Marc Chagall Quotations

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.

Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it / a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand / as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

On cannot be precise, and still be true.

To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.

In my youth, poverty enriched me, but now I can afford wealth.

One must always be careful not to let one's work be covered with moss.

But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky (the political communist commissar for Education, 1918, fh) 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases.

In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others.

My works are dear to me, each in its own way, I shall have to answer for them on the Day off Judgement. God alone knows whether I shall ever see them again. Quite apart from the money which I was going to receive for their sale there (exhibition in Gallery Der Sturm, Berlin June-July, 1914) and it is no small sum..

No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.

My mother's love for me was so great I have worked hard to justify it.

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.

Color is everything. When color is right, form is right.

Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being - including the unconscious.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe.

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

I am a child who is getting on.

One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter.

My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it

But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures.

For me Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.

What counts is art. painting, a kind of painting that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?

Mine alone is the country of my soul.

I've always painted pictures in which human love floods my colors.

I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

Can my words distill for you a little sweetness, tender and caressing?

We all know that a good person can be a bad artist.But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one.

Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me.

Color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.

Mozart never composed anything, ever! He copied what was written on his soul.

If I weren't a Jew then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now.

If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.

What a genius, that Picasso. It is a pity he doesn't paint.

The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root.

I am working in Paris . I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working.

Changes in societal structure and in art would possess more credibility if they had their origins in the soul and spirit. If people read the words of the prophets with closer attention, they would find the keys to life.

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.

Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.

You cannot explain me with "isms." They are very bad for an artist. What one must believe in is color.

Time is a river without banks.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

The habit of ignoring Nature is deeply implanted in our times. This attitude reminds me of people who never look you in the eye; I find them disturbing and always have to look away.

My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies.

The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fairy tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.

I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk.

If I create with my heart almost all my intentions remain. If it is with the head - almost nothing. An artist must not fear to be himself, to express only himself. If he is absolutely and entirely sincere, what he says and does will be acceptable to others.

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man's hope in love. In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art–the colour of love

If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.