Eugène Delacroix Quotes

“A mere cast taken from nature will always be more real than the best copy a man can produce, for can anyone conceive that an artist’s hand is not guided by his mind…his strange task will not be tinged with the colour of his spirit? For the word realism to have any meaning all men would need to be of the same mind and to conceive things in the same way. For what is the supreme purpose of every form of art if it be not the effect?”

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”

“Authorities are the ruination of great talents, and form almost the entire talent of mediocrities. They are the leading strings with which everyone learns to walk at the beginning of their careers, but they almost always leave a permanent mark. People like Ingres never get them out of their systems and never take a step without invoking their help. It is as though they wished to eat bread and milk all their lives (Monday 10th October 1853)”

“Beavers will invent a new way of building dams before architects accept a new method or a new style in their art.”

“Before you begin, study unceasingly, but once started, make mistake if you must but you must execute freely.”

“By keeping a record of my experiences I live my life twice over. The past returns to me. The future is always with me.”

“By what sad fatality can man never enjoy at the same time all the faculties of his nature, all the perfections of which it is only susceptible at different ages?”

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

“Everything tell me that I need to live a more solitary life. The loveliest and most precious moments of my life are slipping away in amusements which, in truth, bring me nothing but boredom.”

“Fine works of art would never become dated if they contained nothing but genuine feeling. The language of the emotions and the impulses of the human heart never change.”

“He is like everyone else, a compound of strange and inexplicable contrasts, and this is what the writers of novels and plays will never understand; they make their characters all of a piece. But people are not like that. There may be ten different people in one man, and sometimes all ten appear within a single hour.”

“How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves!”

“Human beings are so strangely constructed that they often find consolation and even happiness in misfortune (for instance, when ones is unjustly persecuted, the comfort of knowing that one deserves a better fate), but it far more happens that a man will be bored by prosperity and even think himself supremely miserable.”

“I must not feel bound to ignore something today because I rejected it in the past. Books that seem to contain nothing worthwhile when I first read them may have much to teach when read by eyes of more mature experience.”

“I saw a procession of ants moving along the path in a way which I challenge any naturalist to explain. The entire tribe seemed to be moving in formation as if they were emigrating, with a few worker-ants going along the column in the opposite direction. Where could they have been going?

We are all shut up together higgledy-piggledy, animals, men, and plants, in this vast box they call the universe. We claim to be able to read the stars and to make conjectures about the past and the future, which are both beyond the range of our vision, and yet we understand nothing of the things in front of our eyes.”

“In adversity people regain all the virtues which they lose in prosperity.”

“In literature, the first impression is the strongest.”

“In painting, it establishes itself as a mysterious bridge between the soul of the characters and that of the spectator.”

“Is it not very clear that progress, that is to say, the onward march of all things, good as well as evil, has brought our civilization to the brink of an abyss into which it may possibly fall, giving place to utter barbarism? And the reason for this is not to be found in the law that dominates all others here below, the need for change in some form or other? We must change.”

“It is one of the saddest things in life that we can never be completely known and understood by any one man.”

“Moralists and philosophers (I mean true philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Jesus Christ) never talked politics, they considered their subject only from the human standpoint. Equal rights and other such vain imaginings were not their concern; all that they enjoined upon mankind was resignation to fate, to the constant need to submit to the harsh decrees of nature – a need which no one can deny and no philanthropist can overcome.

They asked nothing more of the sage than that he conform to the laws of nature and play his part in his appointed place amidst a general harmony. Illness, death, poverty, spiritual suffering, these are with us always and will torment us under any form of government; democracy or monarchy, it makes no odds.”

“O shameful philanthropists! O philosophers, without heart or imagination! Do you think that man is a machine like the rest of your machines? You deprive him of his most sacred rights on the pretext of saving him from work which you pretend to consider beneath his dignity, but which is, in fact, the very law of his existence.”

“Poor deluded people, there will be no happiness for you in release from work! See these idle loafers who seem overburdened with the weight of time and have no idea what to do with their leisure which these machines will increase still further. In other times, travelling was a distraction for them, it took them out of their usual rut; they saw new countries and new customs…

Nowadays they are carried so swiftly from place to place that they have no time to see anything; they mark off the stages of their journeys by names of railway stations which look exactly alike, and when they’ve crossed the whole of Europe they feel as though they have never left these dull stations which appear to follow them everywhere, like their own idleness and incapacity for enjoyment. It will not be long before they discover that the costumes and strange customs which they crossed the earth to see are the same all over the world.”

“There are two states of barbarism, one caused by ignorance, the other (for which there is far less hope of remedy), by the excess and abuse of knowledge.”

“We really don't own anything; everything passes through us.”

“When all is said and done scholars can do no more than find in nature what is already there.”

“When the proportions are too perfect it detracts from a sense of the sublime.”

“Why not take advantage of the counterpoises of civilization, the good books.”

“You must use methods familiar to the times in which you live, otherwise you will not be understood, and you will not live. This languages of another age, which you desire to use in speaking to men of your own times, will always be an artificial medium.”