Claude Monet Quotes

“Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.”

“Etretat is becoming more and more amazing. Now is the real moment: the beach with all its fine boats; it is superb, and I am enraged not to be more skillful in rendering all this. I would need two hands and hundreds of canvases.”

“Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.”

“Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all – my head is bursting…”

“Everyday I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.”

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”

“Everything changes, even stone.”

“Finally here is a beautiful day, a superb sun like at Giverny. So I worked without stopping, for the tide at this moment is just as I need it for several motifs. This has bucked me up a bit.”

“For a long time, I have hoped for better days, but alas, today it is necessary for me to lose all hope. My poor wife suffers more and more. I do not think it is possible to be any weaker.”

“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.”

“I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

“I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.”

“I am working, but when one has ceased to do seascape, it is the devil afterward – very difficult; it changes at every instant, and here the weather varies several times in the same day.”

“I can only draw what I see.”

“I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillere for which I've done a few bad rough sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting.”

“I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.”

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

“I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.”

“I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.”

“I have painted many of these water lilies, always changing point of observation, modifying them according to the seasons of the year and adapting them to the different light effects that the changing of the seasons creates.

And, of course, the effect is constantly changing, not just from season to season, but from minute to minute, as aquatic flowers are far from the whole show, they are actually just its accompaniment. The basic element is the body of water whose appearance changes every moment as shreds of sky are reflected in it, giving it life and movement.

Seizing the fleeting moment, or at least the sensation it leaves, is difficult enough when the play of light and color is concentrated on a fixed point, but water, being such a mobile and constantly changing subject, is a real problem. A man can devote his whole life to such a work.”

“I must have flowers. Always and always.”

“I pass my time in the open air on the beach when it is really heavy weather or when the boats go out fishing.”

“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

“I was definitely born under an evil star. I have just been thrown out of the inn where I was staying, naked as a worm.”

“I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.”

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”

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

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

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

“It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”