Diego Rivera Quotes

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’tcapable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fightagainst the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist.

~ Diego Rivera

I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent till he is already drowning.

~ Diego Rivera

Looking back upon my work today, I think the best I have done grew out of things deeply felt, the worst from a pride in mere talent.

~ Diego Rivera

From sunrise to sunset, I was in the forest, sometimes far from the house, with my goat who watched me as a mother does a child. All the animals in the forest became my friends, even dangerous and poisonous ones. Thanks to my goat-mother and my Indian nurse, I have always enjoyed the trust of animals--a precious gift. I still love animals infinitely more than human beings.

~ Diego Rivera

I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.

~ Diego Rivera

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.

~ Diego Rivera

Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.

~ Diego Rivera

While working in California, I met William Valentiner and Edgar Richardson of the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mentioned a desire which I had to paint a series of murals about the industries of the United States, a series that would constitute a new kind of plastic poem, depicting in color and form the story of each industry and its division of labor. Dr. Valentiner was keenly interested, considering my idea a potential base for a new school of modern art in America, as related to the social structure of American life as the art of the Middle Ages had been related to medieval society.

~ Diego Rivera