Paul Cezanne

I'll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs.

Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

Tell me do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.

There are two things in the painter the eye and the mind, each of them should aid the other.

I could paint for a hundred years a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.

The painter must enclose himself within his work, he must respond not with words but with paintings.

Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing one's sensations.

Keep good company - that is go to the Louvre.

Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted.

We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy no soul. But it changes every day.

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

Shadow is a colour as light is but less brilliant, light and shadow are only the relation of two tones.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Here on the river's verge I could be busy for months without changing my place simply leaning a little more to right or left.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

I've come to the conclusion that it's not really possible to help others.

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

The day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed will set off a revolution.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world that's why I've withdrawn from it.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

I ask you to pray for me for once age has overtaken us we find consolation only in religion.

I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain.

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

I allow no one to touch me.

I have sworn to die painting.

A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I'm every inch a painter.

I want to die painting.

A puny body weakens the soul.

The truth is in nature and I shall prove it.

Optics developing in us through study teach us to see.

One does not substitute oneself for the past one merely adds to it a new link.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

You say a new era in art is preparing, you sensed it coming, continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest.

When I judge art I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes it is not art.

It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.

Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them he opens the way for his successors.

With a painter's temperament all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.

My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life.

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

If isolation tempers the strong it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.

The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.

I must be more sensible and realize that at my age illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.

My nervous system is enfeebled only work in oils can sustain me.

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it but you haven't.

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct everything in nature is coloured.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject but to realize sensations.