Top 70 Marcel Duchamp Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Not all artists are Chess players, but all Chess players are artists.”

— Marcel Duchamp

2. “Anything is art if an artist says it is.”

— Marcel Duchamp

3. “There is no solution, for there is no problem.”

— Marcel Duchamp

4. “Destruction is also creation.”

— Marcel Duchamp

5. “Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.”

— Marcel Duchamp

6. “I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

— Marcel Duchamp

7. “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”

— Marcel Duchamp

8. “Chess is a sport. A violent sport.”

— Marcel Duchamp

9. “The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.”

— Marcel Duchamp

10. “Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn’t, in general.”

— Marcel Duchamp

11. “The only thing that is not art is inattention.”

— Marcel Duchamp

12. “It’s not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.”

— Marcel Duchamp

13. “I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.”

— Marcel Duchamp

14. “It is the spectators who make the pictures.”

— Marcel Duchamp

15. “Humor is the only reason to live.”

— Marcel Duchamp

16. “I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.”

— Marcel Duchamp

17. “As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good – I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.”

— Marcel Duchamp

18. “Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.”

— Marcel Duchamp

19. “Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.”

— Marcel Duchamp

20. “The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.”

— Marcel Duchamp

21. “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

— Marcel Duchamp

22. “Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.”

— Marcel Duchamp

23. “What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.”

— Marcel Duchamp

24. “If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.”

— Marcel Duchamp

25. “My idea was to chose an object that wouldn’t attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.”

— Marcel Duchamp

26. “Art is like a shipwreck; it’s every man for himself.”

— Marcel Duchamp

27. “To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.”

— Marcel Duchamp

28. “Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.”

— Marcel Duchamp

29. “Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.”

— Marcel Duchamp

30. “I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.”

— Marcel Duchamp

31. “In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.”

— Marcel Duchamp

32. “All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with ’winning or losing this game of chess.”

— Marcel Duchamp

33. “I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don’t do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.”

— Marcel Duchamp

34. “I don’t care about the word ‘art’ because it has been so discredited. So I want to get rid of it. There is an unnecessary adoration of ‘art’ today.”

— Marcel Duchamp

35. “You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.”

— Marcel Duchamp

36. “I have drawn people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.”

— Marcel Duchamp

37. “I’ve decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That’s all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.”

— Marcel Duchamp

38. “D’ailleurs c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.”

— Marcel Duchamp

39. “In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote in advance of the broken arm .”

— Marcel Duchamp

40. “It’s the viewer that makes the work.”

— Marcel Duchamp

41. “Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.”

— Marcel Duchamp

42. “The word ‘art’ interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I’ve heard, it signifies ’making.”

— Marcel Duchamp

43. “Traditionally, artists suffered for their art, now it’s the audience.”

— Marcel Duchamp

44. “Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.”

— Marcel Duchamp

45. “I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.”

— Marcel Duchamp

46. “My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.”

— Marcel Duchamp

47. “The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realising it at the time.”

— Marcel Duchamp

48. “Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.”

— Marcel Duchamp

49. “It’s true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That’s the only reason for living, in fact.”

— Marcel Duchamp

50. “I’m not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn’t the most important single idea to come out of my work.”

— Marcel Duchamp