Gustave Courbet Art Quotations

I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, maintain that art is completely individual, and that the talent of each artist is but the result of his own inspiration and his own study of past tradition.

I hope always to earn my living by my art without having ever deviated by even a hair's breadth from my principles... to please anyone or to sell more easily.

Art is a wholly physical language whose words are all the visible objects.

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

The state is not competent in artistic matters... When the state leaves us free, it will have carried out its duty.

To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them - in a word, to create a living art - this has been my aim.

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota, without . . . having painted as much as you can cover with your hand, to please somebody or in order to sell the picture more easily.

Art or talent, for an artist, is merely a means of applying his personal faculties to the ideas and the things of the period in which he lives.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

Beauty lies in nature and reveals, once the artist has perceived it, its own expressive power.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.