Quotes from Georges Braque

To work from nature is to improvise.

One day I noticed that I could go on working my art motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me.

Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

Art is a wound turned into light.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.

One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.

It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.

In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations.

Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better.

We must not imitate that which we seek to create.

Art upsets science reassures.

I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty.

Truth exists; only lies are invented.

I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.