Marc Chagall Quotes

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

I am a child who is getting on.

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.

Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being - including the unconscious.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies.

Can my words distill for you a little sweetness, tender and caressing?

What counts is art. painting, a kind of painting that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.

We all know that a good person can be a bad artist.But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one.

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.

Mine alone is the country of my soul.

Mozart never composed anything, ever! He copied what was written on his soul.

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

Color is everything. When color is right, form is right.

If I weren't a Jew then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now.

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it

Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.

I've always painted pictures in which human love floods my colors.

If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man's hope in love. In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art–the colour of love

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.

One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter.

I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk.

What a genius, that Picasso. It is a pity he doesn't paint.

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

You cannot explain me with "isms." They are very bad for an artist. What one must believe in is color.

For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.

What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

If I create with my heart almost all my intentions remain. If it is with the head - almost nothing. An artist must not fear to be himself, to express only himself. If he is absolutely and entirely sincere, what he says and does will be acceptable to others.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.

To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.