Quotes About Inspiration

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life.

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Another word for creativity is courage.

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naïveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.

I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illumination the fog that surround

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

Si je crois en Dieu? Oui, quand je travaille. Quand je suis soumis et modeste, je me sens tellement aidé par quelqu'un qui me fait faire des choses qui me surpassent.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

I am made of all that I have seen.

El artista comienza con una visión, una operación creativa que requiere un esfuerzo. La creatividad requiere coraje.

Creativity takes courage

The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.

I begin to write, almost without realizing it, without thinking, busy transmitting these words I don't recognize, although they are highly significant: "Too much! Too much! You're giving me too much!