Odilon Redon: "True art lies in a reality that is felt"

• "Black is the most essential of all colors. Above all, if I may say so, it draws its excitement and vitality from deep and secret sources of health... One must admire black. Nothing can debauch it".

• "True art lies in a reality that is felt".

• "The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour. My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible".

• "Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas".

• "Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious".

• "My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined".

• "The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on".

• "I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops".

• "What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art".

• "Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate".

• "The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence".

• "I have a feeling only for shadows".

• "I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories".