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Auguste Rodin Quotes (1840-1917)
About Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917) was a French sculptor, and the preeminent sculptor of the modern era. He played a pivotal role in the art of the late nineteenth century, both excelling at and rebelling against the Beaux-Arts tradition.
Best Auguste Rodin Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Auguste Rodin quotes.
“My principles are the laws of experience.”
“I am not a rhetorician, but a man of action.”
“Now to the great artist, everything in nature has character.”
“An artist must possess consummate technique in order to make us forget it.”
“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”
“I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.”
“The great difficulty and crowning glory of art is to paint, to draw, to write, naturally and simply.”
“No sudden inspiration can replace the long years of arduous labor necessary to train the eye to observe, the hand to reproduce.”
“Painting, literature, music, are more closely allied than the public usually admit. They are merely different means of expression.”
“This full, pouting mouth, rich in sensuous expressions. these lips like a lake of pleasure, fringed by the noble, palpitating nostrils.”
“Admiration, is a joy daily kindled afresh... I talk out of the -fullness of life; it belongs to me in a sense larger than that of ownership.”
“If in looking at a picture you have been profoundly moved by it, but have not noticed the color or drawing, you may be sure that they are technically perfect.”
“Michelangelo, revealed me to myself, revealed to me the truth of forms. I went to Florence to find what I possessed in Paris and elsewhere, but it is he who taught me this.”
“The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who calls attention to his style, is like the farmer who devotes his energies to polishing farm implements and never uses them.”
“Were this thoroughly understood, industrial art would be entirely revolutionized — industrial art, that barbarous term, an art which concerns itself with commerce and profit.”
What Auguste Rodin Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Auguste Rodin shared regarding contemporaries.
Auguste Rodin on Johannes Vermeer
“Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it does not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects ; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician ? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”
Quotes About Auguste Rodin
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Auguste Rodin from others.
Aristide Maillol on Auguste Rodin 3 quotes
“Art is complex, I said to Rodin, who smiled because he felt that I was struggling with nature.. ..the beauty of Rodin’s art is.. ..in the thoughts he embodied. As for me, I just take a walk on the beach. A young girl appears. From that girl walking there emanates a soul. That is That is at I want to give my statue, that thing alive, yet immaterial. In composing the figure of one young girl I must give the impression that there are all young girls. From the spirit, my feeling passes into my fingers”
Camille Paglia on Auguste Rodin
“Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.”
About Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917) was a French sculptor, and the preeminent sculptor of the modern era. He played a pivotal role in the art of the late nineteenth century, both excelling at and rebelling against the Beaux-Arts tradition.