Quotes from Eugene Delacroix

What drives men of genius is their obsession with the idea that what has already been done is not good enough.

When all is said and done scholars can do no more than find in nature what is already there.

Each of the beings necessary to our existence who disappears takes away with him a whole world of feelings that no other relationship can revive.

Draftsmen may be made, but colorists are born.

Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.

Authorities are the ruination of great talents, and form almost the entire talent of mediocrities. They are the leading strings with which everyone learns to walk at the beginning of their careers, but they almost always leave a permanent mark. People like Ingres never get them out of their systems and never take a step without invoking their help. It is as though they wished to eat bread and milk all their lives (Monday 10th October 1853)

Fine works of art would never become dated if they contained nothing but genuine feeling. The language of the emotions and the impulses of the human heart never change (26 March 1854).

Before you begin, study unceasingly, but once started, make mistake if you must but you must execute freely (12 May 1855).

La musique est la volupté de l'imagination.

Human beings are so strangely constructed that they often find consolation and even happiness in misfortune (for instance, when ones is unjustly persecuted, the comfort of knowing that one deserves a better fate), but it far more happens that a man will be bored by prosperity and even think himself supremely miserable (19 July 1854).

Beavers will invent a new way of building dams before architects accept a new method or a new style in their art (23 August 1854).

How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves! (15 September 1854)

the outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul…….one works not only to produce art but to give value to time…. — Eugène Delacroix (1798 -1863)

Pourquoi ne pas profiter des contrepoisons de la civilisation, les bons livres.

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

It doesn't do to leave one's work, that is why time and nature, and indeed everything that labours slowly and ceaselessly, produces such good results, but we, whose work is constantly being interrupted, never spin the same thread from beginning to end. Before I left Paris I was producing the work of M. Delacroix, as he was a fortnight ago, now I am about to being the work of the present M. Delacroix (Wednesday 12 May 1852).

O shameful philanthropists! O philosophers, without heart or imagination! Do you think that man is a machine like the rest of your machines? You deprive him of his most sacred rights on the pretext of saving him from work which you pretend to consider beneath his dignity, but which is, in fact, the very law of his existence (Monday 16 May 1853).

He is like everyone else, a compound of strange and inexplicable contrasts, and this is what the writers of novels and plays will never understand; they make their characters all of a piece. But people are not like that. There may be ten different people in one man, and sometimes all ten appear within a single hour (Wednesday 7 December 1853).

In adversity people regain all the virtues which they lose in prosperity (30 January 1855)

Before you begin, study unceasingly, but once started, make mistakes if you must but you must execute freely (12 May 1855).

When the proportions are too perfect it detracts from a sense of the sublime. (13 January 1857)

There are] two states of barbarism, one caused by ignorance, the other (for which there is far less hope of remedy), by the excess and abuse of knowledge. (13 January 1857)

You must use methods familiar to the times in which you live, otherwise you will not be understood, and you will not live. This languages of another age, which you desire to use in speaking to men of your own times, will always be an artificial medium (Monday 16 March 1857)

Artists who seek perfection in everything achieve it in nothing (14 March 1858)