Top 120 Claude Monet Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “One day Boudin said to me, ‘Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky.’ I took his advice.”

— Claude Monet

53. “Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.”

— Claude Monet

54. “Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.”

— Claude Monet

55. “While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose...”

— Claude Monet

56. “It seems to me that when I see nature I see it ready-made, completely written – but then, try to do it!”

— Claude Monet

57. “My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it.”

— Claude Monet

58. “I’m knocked out, I’ve never felt so physically and mentally exhausted, I’m quite stupid with it and long only for bed; but I am happy...”

— Claude Monet

59. “These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.”

— Claude Monet

60. “I’m never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.”

— Claude Monet

61. “No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.”

— Claude Monet

62. “It’s the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one’s done.”

— Claude Monet

63. “No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.”

— Claude Monet

64. “I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.”

— Claude Monet

65. “One’s better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one’s own. In fact it’s a terrible business and the task is a hard one.”

— Claude Monet

66. “I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.”

— Claude Monet

67. “It is only too easy to catch people’s attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.”

— Claude Monet

68. “You’ll understand, I’m sure that I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. It’s my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most...”

— Claude Monet

69. “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment.”

— Claude Monet

70. “All of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was.”

— Claude Monet

71. “It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.”

— Claude Monet

72. “Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

— Claude Monet

73. “I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.”

— Claude Monet

74. “Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things.”

— Claude Monet

75. “I’m not performing miracles, I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint...”

— Claude Monet

76. “I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.”

— Claude Monet

77. “One day I am satisfied, the next day I find it all bad; still I hope that some day I will find some of them good.”

— Claude Monet

78. “The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit.”

— Claude Monet

79. “The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.”

— Claude Monet

80. “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”

— Claude Monet

81. “Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.”

— Claude Monet

82. “Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.”

— Claude Monet

83. “If only the weather would improve, there’d be hope of some work, but every day brings rain.”

— Claude Monet

84. “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape.”

— Claude Monet

85. “Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.”

— Claude Monet

86. “The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began working a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water.”

— Claude Monet

87. “I would love to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but I cannot find them the way I want them.”

— Claude Monet

88. “If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!”

— Claude Monet

89. “What is it that’s taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?”

— Claude Monet

90. “Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I’m exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I’ve set out to do.”

— Claude Monet

91. “When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can’t think any more.”

— Claude Monet

92. “I can only draw what I see.”

— Claude Monet

93. “I’m very happy, very delighted. I’m setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I’m surrounded here by all that I love.”

— Claude Monet

94. “The effect of sincerity is to give one’s work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.”

— Claude Monet

95. “It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again...”

— Claude Monet

96. “Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room...”

— Claude Monet

97. “I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics.”

— Claude Monet

98. “I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.”

— Claude Monet

99. “I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.”

— Claude Monet

100. “I know well enough in advance that you’ll find my paintings perfect. I know that if they are exhibited they’ll be a great success, but I couldn’t be more indifferent to it since I know they are bad, I’m certain of it.”

— Claude Monet