Top 80 Edgar Degas Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Edgar Degas

Featured in: Artist Quotes, Art Quotes, Dance Quotes

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

— Edgar Degas

5. “Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.”

— Edgar Degas

6. “Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.”

— Edgar Degas

7. “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

8. “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

9. “The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.”

— 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. “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

12. “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

13. “There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.”

— Edgar Degas

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

— Edgar Degas

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Instantaneity is photography.”

— Edgar Degas

18. “An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.”

— Edgar Degas

19. “I want to be famous but unknown!”

— Edgar Degas

20. “Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance.”

— Edgar Degas

21. “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

22. “If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.”

— Edgar Degas

23. “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”

— Edgar Degas

24. “People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.”

— Edgar Degas

25. “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

26. “There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.”

— Edgar Degas

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

— Edgar Degas

28. “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

Featured in: Intelligence Quotes

29. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

30. “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

31. “What a horrible thing yellow is.”

— Edgar Degas

32. “There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.”

— Edgar Degas

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

— Edgar Degas

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

— Edgar Degas

35. “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

36. “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

37. “Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.”

— Edgar Degas

38. “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

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

— 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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

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

— Edgar Degas

44. “Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.”

— Edgar Degas

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

— Edgar Degas

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

— Edgar Degas

47. “Art is really a battle.”

— Edgar Degas

48. “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

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