Marc Chagall Quotes & Sayings

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

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

On cannot be precise, and still be true. — Marc Chagall

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

Time is a river without banks. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

Color is everything. When color is right, form is right. — Marc Chagall

My works are dear to me, each in its own way, I shall have to answer for them on the Day off Judgement. God alone knows whether I shall ever see them again. Quite apart from the money which I was going to receive for their sale there (exhibition in Gallery Der Sturm, Berlin June-July, 1914) and it is no small sum.. — Marc Chagall

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

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

My mother's love for me was so great
I have worked hard to justify it. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes. — Marc Chagall

Love and fantasy, go hand in hand. — Marc Chagall

In my youth, poverty enriched me, but now I can afford wealth. — Marc Chagall

Her silence is mine. — Marc Chagall

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

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment. — Marc Chagall

But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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

What counts is art. painting, a kind of painting that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection? — Marc Chagall

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love. — Marc Chagall

One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter. — Marc Chagall

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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

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. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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

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. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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

I am a child who is getting on. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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

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? — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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. — Marc Chagall

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

Great art picks up where nature ends. — Marc Chagall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her. — Marc Chagall

I have always painted pictures where human love floods my colors. — Marc Chagall

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

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

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

Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else. — Marc Chagall

Mine alone is the country of my soul. — Marc Chagall

For me Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. — Marc Chagall