Claude Monet Quotes

As for myself, I met with as much success as I ever could have wanted. In other words, I was enthusiastically run-down by every critic of the period.

Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.

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

I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.

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.

I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.

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.

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.

Apart from painting and gardening, I'm not good at anything.

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.

My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

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

I can only draw what I see.

I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

Lots of people will protest that it's quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad

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

I didn't become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.

My life has been nothing but a failure.

What I need most of all is color, always, always.

It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece

I see less and less... I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up... I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.