Claude Monet was a French painter and the founder of impressionist painting.
Oscar-Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris and died aged 86.
A pivotal figure in the Impressionist movement, Monet was initially a caricaturist before delving into painting, studying at the Swiss Academy in 1859.
Financial struggles didn’t hinder his art, with Paul Durand-Ruel buying and promoting his works.
Monet, alongside contemporaries like Manet and Renoir, produced iconic works, including “Impression, Rising Sun”, crystallizing the Impressionist style.
Settling in Giverny in 1883, Monet found inspiration in its captivating gardens, leading to famous pieces like the “Water Lilies” series. He passed away in Giverny in 1926.
I have handpicked the top quotes by Claude Monet for you.
Best Claude Monet Quotes
Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly. ~ Claude Monet.
Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens. ~ Claude Monet.
Light is the most important person in the picture. ~ Claude Monet.
These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession. ~ Claude Monet.
My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it. ~ Claude Monet.
What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence. ~ Claude Monet.
I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way… ~ Claude Monet.
One can do something if one can see and understand it… ~ Claude Monet.
Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment. ~ Claude Monet.
All of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was. ~ Claude Monet.
The real subject of every painting is light. ~ Claude Monet.
My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws. ~ Claude Monet.
These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel. ~ Claude Monet.
I can only draw what I see. ~ Claude Monet.
You’ll understand, I’m sure that I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. It’s my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most… ~ Claude Monet.
Famous Claude Monet Quotes
Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it. ~ Claude Monet.
A good impression is lost so quickly… ~ Claude Monet.
The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects. ~ Claude Monet.
I haven’t many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me. ~ Claude Monet.
I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible. ~ Claude Monet.
Popular Claude Monet Quotes
It is only too easy to catch people’s attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before. ~ Claude Monet.
Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of blue and pink: it’s enchanting, it’s delicious. ~ Claude Monet.
When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can’t think any more. ~ Claude Monet.
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding. ~ Claude Monet.
I didn’t become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one. ~ Claude Monet.
Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep. ~ Claude Monet.
I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It’s true that fretting never did any good. ~ Claude Monet.
It’s enough to drive you crazy, trying to depict the weather, the atmosphere, the ambience. ~ Claude Monet.
I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even. ~ Claude Monet.
I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny. ~ Claude Monet.
Great Claude Monet Quotes
It’s the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one’s done. ~ Claude Monet.
I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics. ~ Claude Monet.
Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule. ~ Claude Monet.
One’s better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one’s own. In fact it’s a terrible business and the task is a hard one. ~ Claude Monet.
Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength. ~ Claude Monet.
It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly. ~ Claude Monet.
I’m never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel. ~ Claude Monet.
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. ~ Claude Monet.
I’m knocked out, I’ve never felt so physically and mentally exhausted, I’m quite stupid with it and long only for bed; but I am happy… ~ Claude Monet.
For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment. ~ Claude Monet.
My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions. ~ Claude Monet.
Thought-Provoking Claude Monet Quotes
Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. ~ Claude Monet.
I had so much fire in me and so many plans… ~ Claude Monet.
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition. ~ Claude Monet.
The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout. ~ Claude Monet.
My life has been nothing but a failure. ~ Claude Monet.
Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. ~ Claude Monet.
Nature won’t be summoned to order and won’t be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught. ~ Claude Monet.
Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive. ~ Claude Monet.
People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love. ~ Claude Monet.
Top Claude Monet Quotes
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute. ~ Claude Monet.
I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture. ~ Claude Monet.
I would like to paint the way a bird sings. ~ Claude Monet.
It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them. ~ Claude Monet.
The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration. ~ Claude Monet.
It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare. ~ Claude Monet.
For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject. ~ Claude Monet.
Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things. ~ Claude Monet.
To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at. ~ Claude Monet.
All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it. ~ Claude Monet.
Profound Claude Monet Quotes
Water Lilies’ is an extension of my life. Without the water the lilies cannot live, as I am without art. ~ Claude Monet.
It is better to have done something than to have been someone. ~ Claude Monet.
No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others. ~ Claude Monet.
No, I’m not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet. ~ Claude Monet.
Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It’s wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane. ~ Claude Monet.
I haven’t yet managed to capture the color of this landscape; there are moments when I’m appalled at the colors I’m having to use, I’m afraid what I’m doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying. ~ Claude Monet.
My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions. ~ Claude Monet.
Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers. ~ Claude Monet.
Deep Claude Monet Quotes
I am only good at two things, and those are: gardening and painting. ~ Claude Monet.
I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found – the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible. ~ Claude Monet.
What is it that’s taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers? ~ Claude Monet.
It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again… ~ Claude Monet.
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. ~ Claude Monet.
I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is. ~ Claude Monet.
So these were the 78 top Claude Monet quotes and sayings.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Clara Barton quotes and Orson Welles quotes.
