Renoir: "Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art"

"An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature".

"Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art".

"Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you being a genius".

"Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character".

"God, the king of artists, was clumsy".

"I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child".

"If it [dabbling in art] didn't amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn't do it".

"If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal".

"I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime; honours shower upon me from every side; artists pay me compliments on my work; there are many people to whom my position must seem enviable ... But I don't seem to have a single real friend!"

"I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old".

"In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known".

"I need to feel the excitement of life stirring around me, and I will always need to feel that".

"I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it".

"In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula".

"It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre".