Eugène Delacroix Quotes

He is like everyone else, a compound of strange and inexplicable contrasts, and this is what the writers of novels and plays will never understand; they make their characters all of a piece. But people are not like that. There may be ten different people in one man, and sometimes all ten appear within a single hour (Wednesday 7 December 1853).

Artists who seek perfection in everything achieve it in nothing (14 March 1858)

O shameful philanthropists! O philosophers, without heart or imagination! Do you think that man is a machine like the rest of your machines? You deprive him of his most sacred rights on the pretext of saving him from work which you pretend to consider beneath his dignity, but which is, in fact, the very law of his existence (Monday 16 May 1853).

[There are] two states of barbarism, one caused by ignorance, the other (for which there is far less hope of remedy), by the excess and abuse of knowledge. (13 January 1857)

You must use methods familiar to the times in which you live, otherwise you will not be understood, and you will not live. This languages of another age, which you desire to use in speaking to men of your own times, will always be an artificial medium (Monday 16 March 1857)

I must not feel bound to ignore something today because I rejected it in the past. Books that seem to contain nothing worthwhile when I first read them may have much to teach when read by eyes of more mature experience. (Tuesday 8th October 1822)

Nous ne possédons réellement rien; tout nous traverse.

Moralists and philosophers (I mean true philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Jesus Christ) never talked politics, they considered their subject only from the human standpoint. Equal rights and other such vain imaginings were not their concern; all that they enjoined upon mankind was resignation to fate...to the constant need to submit to the harsh decrees of nature- a need which no one can deny and no philanthropist can overcome. They asked nothing more of the sage than that he conform to the laws of nature and play his part in his appointed place amidst a general harmony. Illness, death, poverty, spiritual suffering, these are with us always and will torment us under any form of government; democracy or monarchy, it makes no odds. (20 February 1847)

Everything tell me that I need to live a more solitary life. The loveliest and most precious moments of my life are slipping away in amusements which, in truth, bring me nothing but boredom. (Sunday 4 April 1824).

Dans la peinture, il s'établit comme un pont mystérieux entre l'âme des personnages et celle du spectateur.

En littérature, la première impression est la plus forte.

Everything tells me that I need to live a more solitary life. The loveliest and most precious moments of my life are slipping away in amusements which, in truth, bring me nothing but boredom. (Sunday 4 April 1824)

Before you begin, study unceasingly, but once started, make mistakes if you must but you must execute freely (12 May 1855).

"Par quelle triste fatalité l'homme ne peut-il jamais jouir à la fois de toutes les facultés de sa nature, de toutes les perfections dont elle n'est susceptible qu'à des âges différents?"
(Mardi 9 octobre, 1849)

When the proportions are too perfect it detracts from a sense of the sublime. (13 January 1857)