Quotes by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

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Masterpieces are not made to take your eyes. They are made to persuade, to convince, to enter us through all the pores.

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Art is never in so high a degree of perfection than when it so strongly resembles nature that it may be taken for nature itself...

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The study or contemplation of the masterpieces of art must serve only to render that of nature more fruitful, easier; he must not tend to throw it away, nature being that from which all perfections spring and derive their origin...

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Nothing else can be higher than nature when it is beautiful, and no human effort can not only surpass it, but even equal it.

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There are not two arts, there is only one: that which has eternal and natural beauty as its foundation. Those who look elsewhere are mistaken, and even in the most sinister way...

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The serious study of the great philosophical truths which carry our minds up to the height of the laws which govern the moral and intellectual world is of the greatest use for the development and improvement of art. When art comes to understand and realize this great end of its mission, the high science of philosophy then feels the sweet satisfaction of seeing in the productions of art the eternal object of its deep meditations, the lofty contemplations of the intellect, the ardent passions of man, and all the desires and the struggles of the human soul...

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Faint praise of a beautiful thing is an offense.