Top 120 Claude Monet Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My life has been nothing but a failure.”

— Claude Monet

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life

2. “To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.”

— Claude Monet

Featured in: Painting Quotes

3. “Everything changes, even stone.”

— Claude Monet

4. “Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.”

— Claude Monet

5. “The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.”

— Claude Monet

6. “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”

— Claude Monet

7. “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”

— Claude Monet

8. “The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.”

— Claude Monet

9. “These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.”

— Claude Monet

10. “I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”

— Claude Monet

11. “It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”

— Claude Monet

12. “My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.”

— Claude Monet

13. “Light is the most important person in the picture.”

— Claude Monet

14. “A good impression is lost so quickly...”

— Claude Monet

15. “I’m continuing to work hard, not without periods of discouragement, but my strength comes back again.”

— Claude Monet

16. “I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.”

— Claude Monet

17. “What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.”

— Claude Monet

18. “Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.”

— Claude Monet

19. “Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.”

— Claude Monet

20. “I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.”

— Claude Monet

21. “I never draw except with brush and paint...”

— Claude Monet

22. “I must have flowers, always, and always.”

— Claude Monet

23. “I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found – the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible.”

— Claude Monet

24. “Water Lilies’ is an extension of my life. Without the woter the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.”

— Claude Monet

25. “It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.”

— Claude Monet

26. “All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.”

— Claude Monet

27. “The real subject of every painting is light.”

— Claude Monet

28. “Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.”

— Claude Monet

29. “I had so much fire in me and so many plans...”

— Claude Monet

30. “Nature won’t be summoned to order and won’t be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.”

— Claude Monet

31. “The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.”

— Claude Monet

32. “I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.”

— Claude Monet

33. “I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.”

— Claude Monet

34. “I haven’t yet managed to capture the colour of this landscape; there are moments when I’m appalled at the colours I’m having to use, I’m afraid what I’m doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying.”

— Claude Monet

35. “It’s enough to drive you crazy, trying to depict the weather, the atmosphere, the ambience.”

— Claude Monet

36. “I’m in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.”

— Claude Monet

37. “I didn’t become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.”

— Claude Monet

38. “Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.”

— Claude Monet

39. “Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It’s wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.”

— Claude Monet

40. “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

— Claude Monet

41. “I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.”

— Claude Monet

42. “For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.”

— Claude Monet

43. “It is better to have done something than to have been someone.”

— Claude Monet

44. “Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of blue and pink: it’s enchanting, it’s delicious.”

— Claude Monet

45. “I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It’s true that fretting never did any good.”

— Claude Monet

46. “Apart from painting and gardening, I’m not good at anything.”

— Claude Monet

47. “No, I’m not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.”

— Claude Monet

48. “I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way...”

— Claude Monet

49. “My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.”

— Claude Monet

50. “I haven’t many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.”

— Claude Monet