Quotes from Marc Chagall

Vielleicht ist meine Kunst die Kunst eines Wahnsinnigen, ein funkelndes Quecksilber, eine blaue Seele, die über meine Bilder hereinbricht.

Her silence is mine.

Cependant les années s'avançaient. Il fallait commencer à imiter les autres, leur ressembler.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

I've always painted pictures in which human love floods my colors.

Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.

On cannot be precise, and still be true.

One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter.

I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her".

In my youth, poverty enriched me, but now I can afford wealth.

Time is a river without banks.

All colours are the friends of their neighbours and the lovers of their opposites.

All our interior world is reality - and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.

My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

One must always be careful not to let one's work be covered with moss.

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.