Edgar Degas, born in 1834 in Paris, France, was a pivotal figure in the Impressionist movement, although he preferred to be known as a realist or independent. Renowned for his depictions of dancers, Degas captured the grace, movement, and intensity of ballet through his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. His innovative compositions and use of unconventional viewpoints revolutionized the portrayal of the human figure in art. Degas was also fascinated by everyday life, often depicting scenes of Parisian society, horse racing, and women in intimate settings. His mastery of color, light, and form, coupled with his keen observation of human behavior, made him one of the most influential artists of his time. Despite facing criticism and financial struggles, Degas remained dedicated to his artistic vision, leaving behind a legacy of innovation and inspiration that continues to influence artists today.

Edgar Degas Quotes

1. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
— Edgar Degas

2. “You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.”
— Edgar Degas

3. “The true traveler never arrives.”
— Edgar Degas

4. “Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.”
— Edgar Degas

5. “Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.”
— Edgar Degas

6. “Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.”
— Edgar Degas

7. “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.”
— Edgar Degas

8. “The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.”
— Edgar Degas

9. “It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one’s memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.”
— Edgar Degas

10. “The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.”
— Edgar Degas

11. “There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.”
— Edgar Degas

12. “No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.”
— Edgar Degas

13. “Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid and the other one is out to get him. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”
— Edgar Degas

14. “Instantaneity is photography.”
— Edgar Degas

15. “Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.”
— Edgar Degas

16. “I want to be famous but unknown!”
— Edgar Degas

17. “An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.”
— Edgar Degas

18. “People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.”
— Edgar Degas

19. “And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.”
— Edgar Degas

20. “If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.”
— Edgar Degas

21. “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”
— Edgar Degas

22. “People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.”
— Edgar Degas

23. “It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.”
— Edgar Degas

24. “There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.”
— Edgar Degas

25. “Taste! It doesn’t exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.”
— Edgar Degas

26. “There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.”
— Edgar Degas

27. “The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.”
— Edgar Degas

28. “What a horrible thing yellow is.”
— Edgar Degas

29. “Drawing is the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.”
— Edgar Degas

30. “There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.”
— Edgar Degas

31. “Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn’t painting be too?”
— Edgar Degas

32. “Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance.”
— Edgar Degas

33. “It is people’s movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move, how sad would be the tree – and so should we.”
— Edgar Degas

34. “I’m glad I haven’t found my style yet. I’d be bored to death.”
— Edgar Degas

35. “If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn’t want anyone killed. I’d be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with.”
— Edgar Degas

36. “Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.”
— Edgar Degas

37. “I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.”
— Edgar Degas

38. “A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.”
— Edgar Degas

39. “You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there’s no point in working.”
— Edgar Degas

40. “So that’s the telephone? They ring, and you run.”
— Edgar Degas

41. “I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.”
— Edgar Degas

42. “If painting weren’t so difficult, it wouldn’t be fun.”
— Edgar Degas

43. “Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement.”
— Edgar Degas

44. “The frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting’s expense.”
— Edgar Degas

45. “Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.”
— Edgar Degas

46. “Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.”
— Edgar Degas

47. “One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.”
— Edgar Degas

48. “Art is really a battle.”
— Edgar Degas

49. “The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.”
— Edgar Degas

50. “We were created to look at one another, weren’t we?”
— Edgar Degas

51. “The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.”
— Edgar Degas

52. “In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.”
— Edgar Degas

53. “Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult – the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.”
— Edgar Degas

54. “One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one’s recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.”
— Edgar Degas

55. “Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people’s compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?”
— Edgar Degas

56. “I really have a lot of stuff in my head; if only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things.”
— Edgar Degas

57. “Drawing is your understanding of form.”
— Edgar Degas

58. “I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, ‘That’s a pretty little thing,’ after I had finished a picture.”
— Edgar Degas

59. “A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.”
— Edgar Degas

60. “Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.”
— Edgar Degas

61. “The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.”
— Edgar Degas

62. “Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, ‘I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.’”
— Edgar Degas

63. “What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it’s charming.”
— Edgar Degas

64. “I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.”
— Edgar Degas

65. “A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.”
— Edgar Degas

66. “One must have a high opinion of a work of art – not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.”
— Edgar Degas

67. “A painting is above all a product of the artist’s imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn’t spoil anything.”
— Edgar Degas

68. “For those who don’t know what they are doing, painting is easy. For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult.”
— Edgar Degas

69. “Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.”
— Edgar Degas

70. “What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn’t interest me.”
— Edgar Degas

71. “Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.”
— Edgar Degas

72. “What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.”
— Edgar Degas

73. “Make people’s portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.”
— Edgar Degas

74. “Be sure to give the same expression to a person’s face that you give to his body.”
— Edgar Degas

75. “I have seen some very beautiful things through my anger, and what consoles me a little, is that through my anger I do not stop looking…”
— Edgar Degas

76. “I’ll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!”
— Edgar Degas

77. “Success! Success! The enemy of progress!”
— Edgar Degas

78. “A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.”
— Edgar Degas

79. “The creation of a painting takes as much trickery and premeditation as the commitment of a crime.”
— Edgar Degas

80. “I would rather do nothing than do a rough sketch without having looked at anything. My memories will do better.”
— Edgar Degas

81. “Even in front of nature one must compose.”
— Edgar Degas

82. “The frame is the reward of the artist.”
— Edgar Degas