“I want to be famous but unknown!”
― Edgar Degas

“To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.”
― Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”
― Claude Monet

“A thought expressed is a falsehood." In poetry what is not said and yet gleams through the beauty of the symbol, works more powerfully on the heart than that which is expressed in words. Symbolism makes the very style, the very artistic substance of poetry inspired, transparent, illuminated throughout like the delicate walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is ignited.

Characters can also serve as symbols. Sancho Panza and Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet, Don Juan and Falstaff, according to the words of Goethe, are "schwankende Gestalten."

Apparitions which haunt mankind, sometimes repeatedly from age to age, accompany mankind from generation to generation. It is impossible to communicate in any words whatsoever the idea of such symbolic characters, for words only define and restrict thought, but symbols express the unrestricted aspect of truth.

Moreover we cannot be satisfied with a vulgar, photographic exactness of experimental photoqraphv. We demand and have premonition of, according to the allusions of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, Ibsen, new and as yet undisclosed worlds of impressionability. This thirst for the unexperienced, in pursuit of elusive nuances, of the dark and unconscious in our sensibility, is the characteristic feature of the coming ideal poetry. Earlier Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe said that the beautiful must somewhat amaze, must seem unexpected and extraordinary. French critics more or less successfully named this feature - impressionism.

Such are the three major elements of the new art: a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability.

No positivistic conclusions, no utilitarian computation, but only a creative faith in something infinite and immortal can ignite the soul of man, create heroes, martyrs and prophets... People have need of faith, they need inspiration, they crave a holy madness in their heroes and martyrs.

("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”
― Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Silver Age of Russian Culture

“I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Like I said, basements usually smell like surrealism. But kitchens and gardens almost always smell like impressionism.

Because our kitchen is part of a basement apartment, it smells like the early impressionism of Vincent Van Gogh - all big strokes of umber and ochre - a peppery greasy I-love-you smell.”
― Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1

“What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.”
― Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“I paint what I see and not what others like to see.”
― Édouard Manet

“Recently I've been working very hard and quickly; in this way I try to express the desperately fast passage of things in modern life.

Yesterday, in the rain, I painted a large landscape with fields as far as the eye can see, viewed from a height, different kinds of greenery, a dark green field of potatoes, the rich purple earth between the regular rows of plants, to one side a field of peas white with bloom, a field of clover with pink flowers and the little figure of a mower, a field of tall, ripe, fawn-coloured grass, then some wheat, some poplars, on the horizon a last line of blue hills at the foot of which a train is passing, leaving an immense trail of white smoke over the greenery. A white road crosses the canvas, on the road a little carriage and some white houses with bright red roofs alongside a road. Fine drizzle streaks the whole with blue or grey lines.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Very well, Vincent," said Zola with a smile, "you have been nominated for the cult of ugliness. Do you accept the nomination?"
"Alas," said Vincent, "I'm afraid I was born into it.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“... from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her—it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton—a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Light is impressionism.”
― Gae Aulenti

“We'll be fine’, Pierre-Auguste Renoir said assertively. ‘We are good artist; we know that. Remember what Baudelaire said before he died: "Nothing can be done except little by little." That is what we are doing, it is not big, but it is something!”
― Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in a Nutshell

“Pred platnima impresionista čovek nije mogao verovati da jedna životinjska vrsta koja je tako nešto stvorila može istovremeno spremati ubilački rat”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they.

~Berthe Morisot”
― Paula Butterfield

“One can paint a moment or time of day. Even the feeling of a moment. It is what Impressionism is--the painting of a moment. But how does one paint movement itself? Paint time passing?

[Édouard Manet]”
― Maureen Gibbon, The Lost Notebook of Édouard Manet

“Lecz teraz nie mam ani chwili do stracenia. Nie ma tu wytchnienia, nie ma cienia drżących liści ani altany, w której można by się schronić przed słońcem, usiąść z ukochaną na wieczornym chłodzie.

(...) To jest życie - Pan Prentice o czwartej, Pan Eyres o czwartej czterdzieści
(...) Brzemię świata spoczywa na naszych barkach. To jest życie. Jeśli będę parł do przodu, odziedziczę fotel i dywan, posiadłość w Surrey ze szklarniami i jakimś niezwykłym okazem drzewa szpilkowego, melona albo kwitnącego drzewa, którego będą mi zazdrościli inni handlowcy”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Jestem sama we wrogim świecie. Ludzka twarz jest odrażająca. To dobrze. Chcę rozgłosu i przemocy, i chcę się roztrzaskać jak kamień o skały. Lubię kominy fabryczne i dźwigi, i ciężarówki. Lubię pochody twarzy i twarzy, i twarzy, zniekształconych, obojętnych. Mam dość ładności. Mam dość odosobnienia.

Unoszę się na wzburzonej wodzie i zatonę, i nikt mnie nie uratuje.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Impressionism is not a movement, it is a philosophy of life.”
― Max Lieberman

“The most striking phenomenon connected with the progress of technology is the development of cultural centres into large cities in the modern sense; these form the soil in which the new art is rooted. Impressionism is an urban art, and not only because it discovers the landscape quality of the city and brings painting back from the country into the town, but because it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man. It is an urban style, because it describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of city life. And precisely as such, it implies an enormous expansion of sensual perception, a new sharpening of sensibility, a new irritability, and, with the Gothic and romanticism, it signifies one of the most important turning points in the history of Western art. In the dialectical process represented by the history of painting, the alternation of the static and the dynamic, of design and colour, abstract order and organic life, impressionism forms the climax of the development in which recognition is given to the dynamic and organic elements of experience and which completely dissolves the static world-view of the Middle Ages. A continuous line can be traced from the Gothic to impressionism comparable to the line leading from late medieval economy to high capitalism, and modern man, who regards his whole existence as a struggle and a competition, who translates all being into motion and change, for whom experience of the world increasingly becomes experience of time, is the product of this bilateral, but fundamentally uniform development.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“With these innovations, however, the succession of reductions employed by the impressionist method is by no means exhausted. The very colours which impressionism uses alter and distort those of our everyday experience. We think, for example, of a piece of ‘white’ paper as white in every lighting, despite the coloured reflexes which it shows in ordinary daylight. In other words: the ‘remembered colour’ which we associate with an object, and which is the result of long experience and habit, displaces the concrete impression gained from immediate perception; impressionism now goes back behind the remembered, theoretically established colour to the real sensation, which is, incidentally, in no sense a spontaneous act, but represents a supremely artificial and extremely complicated psychological process.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“The first impression to healing is perception whereby circumstances involve”
― Wilson M Mukama

“i do not want you to just be into my photography, instead, i'd much rather you take a journey into my pictures, and feel the impression i have created, feel it with all your senses”
― Bodhi Smith, Bodhi Smith Impressionist Photography

“Une cuisse, une fleur, un chignon, ballerines contordues en l'envol du tutu; le nez d'un pompier; rashers et jockeys évoluant sur le vert; une main de modiste dans une palpitation de plumes et de rubans; des cires peintes qui vivent. Cinématique infaillible. Les roueries des lumières artificielles surprises. Le Moderne exprimé.”
― Félix Fénéon, Petit Bottin des Lettres Et des Arts

“In my work, we find the direct consciousness of an essential humanity. Monet shared this quality and for that I prefer Monet to Cézanne....”
― Rothko, Mark

“(...) Nuży mnie własny pokój i nuży mnie niebo. Moje istnienie skrzy się tylko wtedy, gdy wszystkie jego ścianki wystawione są na wzrok wielu ludzi. Niech się nie zjawią, a jestem pełen dziur i kurczę się jak spalony papier.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Many artists took their easels and paints outside and captured what they saw. Vincent wanted to capture what he felt as he tried to remember what he saw.”
― Russ Ramsey, Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith

“The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.”
― Claude Debussy

“I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”
― Claude Debussy