Edgar Degas Quotes

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Lies can be wonderful things, and when a lie is told artfully, if it's done with a degree of craftsmanship, I can't help but admire the liar.

I was one of the most brilliant liars as a child.

Great liars are also great magicians.

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.

It's the word 'artful'; it's such a great word, with its dark and its light side, its art and its cunning, the craft and the crafty of it - I've been preoccupied with the word 'artful' and the twin notions of 'cornucopia' and 'pickpocket' it suggests for quite some time.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

Artifice is art.

Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.

In Hollywood, lying is something that people do like breathing.

In the essence of truth lies deceit.

My young friend supposes his ingenuousness is merely a ruse.

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

Be not caught by the cunning of those who appear in a disguise.

Undoubtedly ... there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. What bears affinity to cunning is despicable.

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.

What magicians we are, turning darkness into light, transforming invisible atoms into dazzling theater of the world, pulling objects, (people as well as rabbits) out of secret microscopic closets, turning winter into summer, making a palmful of moments disappear through time's trap door. We learned the methods so long ago that they're unconscious, and we've hypnotized ourselves into believing that we're the audience, so I wonder where we served our apprenticeship. Under what master magicians did we learn to form reality so smoothly that we forgot to tell ourselves the secret?

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

Hope deceives more men than cunning does.

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.

Whoever appears to have much cunning has in reality very little; being deficient in the essential article, which is, to hide cunning.