When someone leaves the legacy of Monet, their life and character will be examined to the finest detail.
Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.
I must have flowers, always, and always.
Every day 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.
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
the more I live, the more I regret how little i know
It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint...
The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.
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.
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.
If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!
I can only draw what I see.
I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
I want to paint the way a bird sings.
…Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all - my head is bursting…
Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.
The further I get, the more I regret how little I know…
No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself…
People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.
My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.
Describing the artist's garden at giverny
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
My life has been nothing but a failure.
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.
Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that's the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.
Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.
Famous Quotes about Claude Monet
"...One could dream of a Monet turning toward the use of large canvases, clear and iridescent, the preserve of Veronese, of Tiepolo. Dream no more, and consider his supreme work, the Nymphéas [Water Lilies]. Despite their monumental dimensions they do not demonstrate the characteristics of Grand Venetian or Flemish decoration. His disposition of spirit appears to me to be that of a great easel painter who decides to offer his vision a field vast enough, imposing enough to embrace the world. (A mirror of water is enough to identify with the Universe.) A cosmic vision, I would say, if this word had not been subverted in recent years and uttered in relation to anyone and anything. Thus Michelangelo, a creator of unique and solitary figures, awaited the day when a Vatican chapel would allow him to blossom and demonstrate his overwhelming power. This is why I am really pleased to describe the Orangerie in the Tuileries as the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. A deserted site in the heart of Paris, a consecration of the inaccessible. What we have here is one of the peaks of French genius..."
André Masson, Monet le fondateur
