It is better to have done something than to have been someone.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.

Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.