Odilon Redon Quotes

I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops.

The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.

I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.

It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born.

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.

My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it.

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

I have a feeling only for shadows

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

True art lies in a reality that is felt.