Marc Chagall Quotes

If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man's hope in love. In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art–the colour of love

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies.

My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

If I create with my heart almost all my intentions remain. If it is with the head - almost nothing. An artist must not fear to be himself, to express only himself. If he is absolutely and entirely sincere, what he says and does will be acceptable to others.

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fair-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.

Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.

The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root.

I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

Time is a river without banks.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.

What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.

I've always painted pictures in which human love floods my colors.

Changes in societal structure and in art would possess more credibility if they had their origins in the soul and spirit. If people read the words of the prophets with closer attention, they would find the keys to life.

Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.

What a genius, that Picasso. It is a pity he doesn't paint.

One must always be careful not to let one's work be covered with moss.

No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.

You cannot explain me with "isms." They are very bad for an artist. What one must believe in is color.

We all know that a good person can be a bad artist.But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one.

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.

I am working in Paris . I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.

Mozart never composed anything, ever! He copied what was written on his soul.

If I weren't a Jew then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now.

Color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being - including the unconscious.

To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.

The habit of ignoring Nature is deeply implanted in our times. This attitude reminds me of people who never look you in the eye; I find them disturbing and always have to look away.

Can my words distill for you a little sweetness, tender and caressing?

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe.

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me.

But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky (the political communist commissar for Education, 1918, fh) 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases.