Quotes from Claude Monet

My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

I haven't many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.

I am pleased with the exhibition... everything on display was sold for a good price to decent people. It has been a long time since I believed that you could educate public taste.

I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.

It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room.

It is difficult to stop in time because one gets carried away. But I have that strength; it is the only strength I have.

Finally here is a beautiful day, a superb sun like at Giverny. So I worked without stopping, for the tide at this moment is just as I need it for several motifs. This has bucked me up a bit.

I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.

I am working, but when one has ceased to do seascape, it is the devil afterward - very difficult; it changes at every instant, and here the weather varies several times in the same day.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I was definitely born under an evil star. I have just been thrown out of the inn where I was staying, naked as a worm.

Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.

Etretat is becoming more and more amazing. Now is the real moment: the beach with all its fine boats; it is superb, and I am enraged not to be more skillful in rendering all this. I would need two hands and hundreds of canvases.

I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.

My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

I'm very happy, very delighted. I'm setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I'm surrounded here by all that I love.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.