Art & Creativity Quote by Edouard Manet

Manet’s line reads like a manifesto written with paint still wet: no grand theories, no polite reverence, no waiting around for “inspiration” to show up wearing a sash. “Instantly” is the tell. It’s not a plea for sloppiness; it’s a demand for urgency, for staying close to perception before culture, training, and taste start laundering it into something acceptable. In Manet’s Paris, where the Academy rewarded mythological polish and historical costume, “paint what you see” is less a technique than a declaration of independence.

The blunt repetition of “When you’ve got it, you’ve got it” turns art into a binary of presence and failure. Not success or fame, not even “beauty,” just the moment when an image feels alive and irreducible. That’s the subtext: the work isn’t justified by subject matter or moral uplift. It’s justified by its immediacy, by the strange authority of looking. If it doesn’t land, you “begin again,” which quietly strips the artist of romance and replaces it with discipline. No tortured genius pose, just relentless resets.

“All the rest is humbug” is Manet’s little grenade lobbed at the salon ecosystem: critics who needed stories, patrons who wanted prestige, institutions that confused finish with truth. The irony is that this anti-philosophy is itself a philosophy, one that helped crack open modernism: less worship of inherited rules, more faith in the eye as an instrument of honesty, even when the result unsettles.