Quotes from Odilon Redon

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops.

The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that goal the artist has set for himself.

True art lies in a reality that is felt.

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

I have tried to put the real at the service of the unreal.

Black is the most essential of all colors. Above all, if I may say so, it draws its excitement and vitality from deep and secret sources of health...One must admire black. Nothing can debauch it.

When I am alone, I love the wide roads. There, I have conversations with myself. My free steps move easily and my body leaves my spirit free of obstacles; it discourses, it reasons, it presses me with questions.

One must respect black, nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism

It is nature also who orders us to obey the gifts she has given us. Mine have led me to dreams; I submitted to the torments of imagination and the surprises she gave me under my pencil; but I directed and led those surprises in accordance with the laws of the organism of art which I know, which I feel, with the single goal of producing in the spectator, by sudden attraction, the whole evocation, and the whole enticement of the uncertain within the confines of thought.

I venerate with emotion everything that comes from the heart when it is simple, silent and confident. It is a sensual pleasure, subtle and touching, to try to reach characters through the varied outer appearances of human conditions.

J'ai fait un art selon moi. Je l'ai fait avec les yeux ouverts sur les merveilles du monde visible, et, quoi qu'on en ait pu dire, avec le souci constant d'obéir aux lois du naturel et de la vie.