Top 50 Auguste Rodin Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”

— Auguste Rodin

Featured in: Time Quotes, Summer Quotes

2. “Patience is also a form of action.”

— Auguste Rodin

Featured in: Patience Quotes

3. “The more simple we are, the more complete we become.”

— Auguste Rodin

4. “Love your calling with passion, it is the meaning of your life.”

— Auguste Rodin

5. “I invent nothing, I rediscover.”

— Auguste Rodin

6. “Where shall we begin? There is no beginning. Start where you arrive. Stop before what entices you. And work! You will enter little by little into the entirety. Method will be born in proportion to your interest.”

— Auguste Rodin

7. “You must always work.”

— Auguste Rodin

8. “Black is the queen of colours.”

— Auguste Rodin

9. “The nude alone is well dressed.”

— Auguste Rodin

10. “The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!”

— Auguste Rodin

11. “What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.”

— Auguste Rodin

12. “There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth.”

— Auguste Rodin

13. “People say I think too much about women, yet, after all what is there more important to think about?”

— Auguste Rodin

14. “To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.”

— Auguste Rodin

15. “The artist has only to trust his eyes.”

— Auguste Rodin

16. “It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.”

— Auguste Rodin

17. “The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.”

— Auguste Rodin

18. “The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning.”

— Auguste Rodin

19. “There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect.”

— Auguste Rodin

20. “To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.”

— Auguste Rodin

21. “In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred.”

— Auguste Rodin

22. “He who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist.”

— Auguste Rodin

23. “The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that.”

— Auguste Rodin

24. “Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.”

— Auguste Rodin

25. “Art is the pleasure of a spirit that enters nature and discovers that it too has a soul.”

— Auguste Rodin

26. “The sculptor represents the transition from one pose to another he indicates how insensibly the first glides into the second. In his work we still see a part of what was and we discover a part of what is to be.”

— Auguste Rodin

27. “I am like a moon that shines on an immense, unknown sea where ships never pass.”

— Auguste Rodin

28. “I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god.”

— Auguste Rodin

29. “There should be no argument in regard to morality in art. There is no morality in nature.”

— Auguste Rodin

30. “Man enjoys living on the edge of his dreams and neglects the real things of the world which are so beautiful. The ignorant and indifferent destroy beautiful things merely by looking at the marble. Things that remake the soul of him who understands them.”

— Auguste Rodin

31. “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.”

— Auguste Rodin

32. “The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms, Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.”

— Auguste Rodin

33. “Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.”

— Auguste Rodin

34. “The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.”

— Auguste Rodin

35. “If we now seek the spiritual significance of the technique of Michelangelo we shall find that his sculpture expressed restless energy...”

— Auguste Rodin

36. “Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.”

— Auguste Rodin

37. “Man’s naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.”

— Auguste Rodin

38. “Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.”

— Auguste Rodin

39. “The realities of nature surpass our most ambitious dreams.”

— Auguste Rodin

40. “Even with all the documents, you can never forge nature.”

— Auguste Rodin

41. “If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul.”

— Auguste Rodin

42. “Nobody does good to men with impunity.”

— Auguste Rodin

43. “Genius only comes to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.”

— Auguste Rodin

44. “The delicate droop of the petals standing out in relief, is like the eyelid of a child.”

— Auguste Rodin

45. “In front of the model I work with the same will to reproduce truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.”

— Auguste Rodin

46. “My drawings are the result of my sculpture.”

— Auguste Rodin

47. “I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.”

— Auguste Rodin

48. “I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.”

— Auguste Rodin

49. “If the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended.”

— Auguste Rodin

50. “Mystery is like a kind of atmosphere which bathes the greatest works of the masters.”

— Auguste Rodin