142 Quotes by Edgar Degas

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

It's easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.

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.

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.

I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.

I put it (a still life of a pear, made by Manet, ed.) there (on the wall, next to Ingres' Jupiter, ed.), for a pear like that would overthrow any god.