A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.
MARCEL DUCHAMP It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines...
MARCEL DUCHAMP In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the co...
MARCEL DUCHAMP All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, bec...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art -- and much more. It cannot be commercial...
MARCEL DUCHAMP The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
MARCEL DUCHAMP Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn'...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
MARCEL DUCHAMP Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that y...
MARCEL DUCHAMP The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it sign...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I like living, breathing better than working... Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribe...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclu...
MARCEL DUCHAMP In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movemen...
MARCEL DUCHAMP If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compar...
MARCEL DUCHAMP When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism,...
MARCEL DUCHAMP 'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, languag...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive ar...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, bu...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something t...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional...
MARCEL DUCHAMP In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual...
MARCEL DUCHAMP One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my g...
MARCEL DUCHAMP When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or...
MARCEL DUCHAMP There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the '...
MARCEL DUCHAMP There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than...
MARCEL DUCHAMP In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.
MARCEL DUCHAMP The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree th...
MARCEL DUCHAMP What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I was highly attracted to chess for forty or forty-five years; then, little by little, my enthusiasm...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to suc...
MARCEL DUCHAMP All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in intr...
MARCEL DUCHAMP In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
MARCEL DUCHAMP Marcel, no more painting; go get a job.
MARCEL DUCHAMP I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these d...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.
MARCEL DUCHAMP Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.
MARCEL DUCHAMP I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., ar...
MARCEL DUCHAMP I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to g...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.
MARCEL DUCHAMP I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products
MARCEL DUCHAMP When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslav...
MARCEL DUCHAMP The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impres...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation.
MARCEL DUCHAMP I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commerciali...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravi...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always sp...
MARCEL DUCHAMP The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or...
MARCEL DUCHAMP One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts t...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves.
MARCEL DUCHAMP Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.
MARCEL DUCHAMP My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Can works be made which are not 'of art'?
MARCEL DUCHAMP I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
MARCEL DUCHAMP Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.
MARCEL DUCHAMP I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.
MARCEL DUCHAMP What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'
MARCEL DUCHAMP Art is all a matter of personality.
MARCEL DUCHAMP All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.. the spectator brings the work in...
MARCEL DUCHAMP Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and compos...
MARCEL PROUST Such is the life of a man. Moments of joy, obliterated by unforgettable sadness. There's no need...
MARCEL PAGNOL In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.
MARCEL MARCEAU People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very or...
MARCEL PROUST In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things.
MARCEL PROUST The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust.
MARCEL PROUST There can be no piece of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a f...
MARCEL PROUST Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliber...
MARCEL PROUST Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An ...
MARCEL PROUST The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been "g...
MARCEL PROUST Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the...
MARCEL PROUST I feel that, for each show I've been doing, there's a character that dominates. Then in the ...
MARCEL DZAMA But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object.
GABRIEL MARCEL It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.
GABRIEL MARCEL On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp.
GABRIEL MARCEL Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.
GABRIEL MARCEL The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring bat...
GABRIEL MARCEL But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.
GABRIEL MARCEL The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in...
GABRIEL MARCEL Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.
GABRIEL MARCEL Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.
GABRIEL MARCEL The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is Possible.
GABRIEL MARCEL Metaphysics is a science.
GABRIEL MARCEL Women like silent men. They think they're listening.
MARCEL ARCHARD Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
ANTHONY MARCEL As the Arab proverb says, The dog barks and the caravan passes. After having dropped this quotation,...
MARCEL PROUST I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in whic...
MARCEL PROUST Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls b...
MARCEL PROUST I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true ...
MARCEL PROUST It's good to shut up sometimes.
MARCEL MARCEAU The fixity of habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
MARCEL PROUST Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
MARCEL PROUST Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our sou...
MARCEL PROUST Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
MARCEL PROUST The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
MARCEL PROUST To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn.
MARCEL JOUHANDEAU That translucent alabaster of our memories.
MARCEL PROUST Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the s...
MARCEL PROUST We become moral when we are unhappy.
MARCEL PROUST People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the o...
MARCEL PROUST The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them to...
MARCEL PROUST Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for reveal...
MARCEL PROUST When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dr...
MARCEL PROUST I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.
MARCEL MARCEAU I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had a...
MARCEL PROUST The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
MARCEL PROUST Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
MARCEL PROUST A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
MARCEL PROUST For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating ...
MARCEL PROUST The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to trea...
MARCEL PROUST The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in ...
MARCEL PROUST There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things...
MARCEL PROUST We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
MARCEL PROUST Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.
MARCEL PROUST All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
MARCEL PROUST Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
MARCEL PROUST Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreove...
MARCEL PROUST The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, ...
MARCEL PROUST A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
MARCEL PROUST The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.
MARCEL PROUST Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found r...
MARCEL PROUST I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destin...
MARCEL MARCEAU It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
MARCEL PROUST The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those t...
MARCEL PROUST The more the world is specialized the more it will be run by generalists.
MARCEL MASSE The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourse...
MARCEL PROUST The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplora...
MARCEL PROUST A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
MARCEL PROUST The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting b...
MARCEL PROUST Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit per...
MARCEL PROUST My advice is to look out for engineers. They begin with sewing machines and end up with nuclear bomb...
MARCEL PAGNOL A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not l...
MARCEL PROUST Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain...
MARCEL PROUST The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
MARCEL PROUST It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to...
MARCEL PROUST People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
MARCEL PROUST There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
MARCEL PROUST There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a wa...
MARCEL PROUST It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all e...
MARCEL PROUST Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
MARCEL MARCEAU The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure...
MARCEL ACHARD We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as place...
MARCEL PROUST If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream ...
MARCEL PROUST In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the fee...
MARCEL PROUST The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
MARCEL PROUST Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey
MARCEL PROUST Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
MARCEL PROUST Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
MARCEL PROUST Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at le...
MARCEL PROUST We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
MARCEL PROUST The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.
MARCEL MARCEAU Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
MARCEL PROUST Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes ...
MARCEL PROUST We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
MARCEL PROUST What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
MARCEL PROUST We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in w...
MARCEL PROUST Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
MARCEL PROUST Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
MARCEL PROUST We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take ...
MARCEL PROUST Love is space and time measured by the heart.
MARCEL PROUST Love is a reciprocal torture.
MARCEL PROUST The only paradise is paradise lost.
MARCEL PROUST Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
MARCEL PROUST I try not to censor myself at all.
MARCEL DZAMA But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of thing...
MARCEL PROUST People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
MARCEL PROUST Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
ANTHONY MARCEL One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.
MARCEL PAGNOL Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls b...
MARCEL PROUST I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's de...
MARCEL MARCEAU Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
MARCEL PROUST The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched...
MARCEL ACHARD There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a w...
MARCEL PROUST It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions
MARCEL PROUST Jean's desires, like those of all men in love, were concentrated on the impossible.
MARCEL PROUST It's incredible how many emotions you feel when crossing the finish line and seeing that you are...
MARCEL HIRSCHER The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us ...
MARCEL PROUST I use dull colors in my drawings because I started out using a root beer base, because it seemed lik...
MARCEL DZAMA Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names...
MARCEL PROUST And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.
MARCEL PROUST It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as a choice exists, it can only be b...
MARCEL PROUST One of a hostess's duties is to act as procuress.
MARCEL PROUST The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
MARCEL PROUST The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.
MARCEL PROUST Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it p...
MARCEL PROUST Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.
MARCEL MARCEAU