Daily Inspiration Quote by Auguste Rodin

Rodin’s line flatters artists while quietly indicting everyone else. “Almost the only men” is a provocation disguised as praise: it suggests modern work is so captured by wages, status, and compliance that pleasure has become an aberration. Coming from a sculptor whose practice demanded monastic repetition and brute physical effort, the claim isn’t romantic fluff. It’s a wager that the deepest discipline is easier to sustain when the engine is appetite, not obligation.

The subtext is also defensive. In Rodin’s era, the artist’s identity was being rewritten: academies, state commissions, bourgeois patrons, and an expanding public market all tried to define what counted as “serious” art. Rodin, often accused of shortcutting craft (even “casting from life”), had reason to reframe labor as something more intimate than respectable toil. Pleasure, here, becomes a credential: the artist works from an inner necessity that can’t be audited by bureaucrats or reduced to a job description.

His gendered phrasing (“men”) reads dated now, but it reveals the cultural frame: work was a moral proving ground for male citizenship, and Rodin is arguing that art escapes that sermon. It’s not leisure; it’s a different economy of value. The line also sharpens a modern anxiety: when your livelihood depends on your output, pleasure starts to look like a luxury. Rodin flips it. For the “true” artist, pleasure isn’t the reward after work; it’s the fuel that makes the work survivable, even when it’s punishing.