Top 80 Edgar Degas Quotes (2025 Update)
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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. “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

55. “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

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 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

60. “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

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

— Edgar Degas

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

— Edgar Degas

63. “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

64. “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

65. “The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.”

— Edgar Degas

66. “Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.”

— Edgar Degas

67. “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

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. “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

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

— Edgar Degas

71. “Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.”

— Edgar Degas

72. “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

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

— Edgar Degas

78. “Success! Success! The enemy of progress!”

— 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