Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it. The expression of the beautiful bears a precise relation to the power of perception acquired by the artist.
~ Gustave Courbet
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Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artist who have lived in it. I also maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art form and can exist only of the representation of both real and existing things.
~ Gustave Courbet
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In our civilized society I must lead the life of a savage. I must free myself even from governments. My sympathies lies with the people; I must go to them directly. I must draw my wisdom from them, and they must give me life. For that reason I have just embarked on the grand, independent and vagabond life of the bohemian.
~ Gustave Courbet
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Painting can not, without falling into abstraction, let a partial aspect of art dominate, whether it be drawing, color, composition, or any other one of the extraordinary multiplicity of means the totality of which alone constitutes this art.
~ Gustave Courbet
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The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830. Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the works would be unnecessary.
~ Gustave Courbet
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The real artists are those who pick up their age exactly at the point to which it has been carried by preceding times.
~ Gustave Courbet
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The human spirit must always begin work afresh in the present, starting off from acquired results. One must never start out from foregone conclusions proceeding from synthesis to synthesis, from conclusion to conclusion.
~ Gustave Courbet
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An epoch can only be reproduced by its own artists, I mean by the artists who lived in it. I hold the artists of one century basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century-in other words, of painting the past or the future.
~ Gustave Courbet
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