Auguste Rodin Art Quotations

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

I invent nothing, I rediscover.

Art is the pleasure of a spirit that enters nature and discovers that it too has a soul.

The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed.

An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.

A mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art, because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character... the artist on the contrary, sees; that is to say, his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature.

There should be no argument in regard to morality in art. There is no morality in nature.

What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.

There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.