Marcel Duchamp quote: "I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art."

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

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 don't believe in art. I believe in artists.
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

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

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Marcel Duchamp

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

Marcel Duchamp

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