"The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects."
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Quote collection
Claude Monet quotes (page 5 of 9)
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"Manet wanted one day to paint my wife and children. Renoir was there. He took a canvas and began painting them, too. After a while, Manet took me aside and whispered, 'You're on very good terms with Renoir and take an interest in his future - do advise him to give up painting! You can see for yourself that it's not his metier at all."
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"My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it."
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"For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment."
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"I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny."
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"I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics."
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"I still don't know where I am going to sleep tomorrow."
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"While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose."
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"My life has been nothing but a failure."
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"I'm getting so slow at my work it makes me despair, but... I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me."
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"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."
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"The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout."
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"Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive."
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"I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found - the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible."
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"I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded."
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"These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel."
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"It would be a very bad idea... to exhibit even a small number of this new series, as the whole effect can only be achieved from an exhibition of the entire group."
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"I have once more taken up things that can't be done: water with grasses weaving on the bottom. But I'm always tackling that sort of thing!"
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"It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again."
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"Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It's wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane."
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