The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of the laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile’s tears, and in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.
~ Gustave Courbet

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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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I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: ‘He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.’
~ Gustave Courbet

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I cannot teach my art, nor the art of any school whatever, since I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, I maintain that art is completely individual, and is, for each artist, nothing but the talent issuing from his own inspiration and his own studies of tradition.
~ 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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There’s nothing harder in the world than making art, particularly when no one understands it.
~ Gustave Courbet

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Along with painters like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko is considered one of the principal artists of the New York School, which radically changed American art after World War II.
~ Elisabetta Povoledo via The New York Times

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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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