Top 60 Eugène Delacroix Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.”

— Eugène Delacroix

2. “Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.”

— Eugène Delacroix

3. “The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.”

— Eugène Delacroix

4. “Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.”

— Eugène Delacroix

5. “A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.”

— Eugène Delacroix

6. “If I haven’t fought for my country at least I’ll paint for her.”

— Eugène Delacroix

7. “The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.”

— Eugène Delacroix

8. “We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.”

— Eugène Delacroix

9. “Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.”

— Eugène Delacroix

10. “Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.”

— Eugène Delacroix

11. “If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.”

— Eugène Delacroix

12. “The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.”

— Eugène Delacroix

13. “What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”

— Eugène Delacroix

14. “A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.”

— Eugène Delacroix

15. “Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.”

— Eugène Delacroix

16. “One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.”

— Eugène Delacroix

17. “Real beauty in the arts is eternal and would be accepted at all periods; but it wears the dress of its century: something of that dress clings to it, and woe to the works which appear in periods when the general taste is corrupted.”

— Eugène Delacroix

18. “I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.”

— Eugène Delacroix

19. “The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.”

— Eugène Delacroix

20. “I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure.”

— Eugène Delacroix

21. “Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.”

— Eugène Delacroix

22. “Draughtsmen may be made, but colourists are born.”

— Eugène Delacroix

23. “Experience alone can give, even to the greatest talent, that confidence in having done all that could be done.”

— Eugène Delacroix

24. “To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.”

— Eugène Delacroix

25. “What I have done cannot be taken from me.”

— Eugène Delacroix

26. “A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.”

— Eugène Delacroix

27. “If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.”

— Eugène Delacroix

28. “Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.”

— Eugène Delacroix

29. “Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.”

— Eugène Delacroix

30. “Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.”

— Eugène Delacroix

31. “Give me some mud, and I will paint you a woman’s flesh.”

— Eugène Delacroix

32. “What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.”

— Eugène Delacroix

33. “Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.”

— Eugène Delacroix

34. “I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict.”

— Eugène Delacroix

35. “Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn than drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.”

— Eugène Delacroix

36. “The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.”

— Eugène Delacroix

37. “Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.”

— Eugène Delacroix

38. “The more an object is polished or brilliant, the less you see its own color and the more it becomes a mirror reflecting the color of its surroundings.”

— Eugène Delacroix

39. “A wife of your own stature is the greatest of all blessings.”

— Eugène Delacroix

40. “One never paints violently enough.”

— Eugène Delacroix

41. “Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.”

— Eugène Delacroix

42. “Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn’t get out of its rut.”

— Eugène Delacroix

43. “Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.”

— Eugène Delacroix

44. “The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.”

— Eugène Delacroix

45. “God is that inner presence which makes us admire the beautiful and consoles us for not sharing the happiness of the wicked.”

— Eugène Delacroix

46. “I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.”

— Eugène Delacroix

47. “I have told myself a hundred times that painting – that is, the material thing called a painting – is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.”

— Eugène Delacroix

48. “Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.”

— Eugène Delacroix

49. “Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.”

— Eugène Delacroix

50. “Every time I await a model, even when I am most pressed to time, I am overjoyed when the time comes and I tremble when I hear the key turn in the door.”

— Eugène Delacroix