Don't imitate, don't follow the others, or else you will lag behind them.

Never lose the first impression which has moved you.

If my time has come I shall have nothing to complain of. For fifty-tree years I have been painting; so I have been able to devote myself entirely to what I loved best in the world. I had never suffered poverty; I had good parents and excellent friends; I can only thank God.

Be guided by feelings alone. Abandon yourself to your first impression. If you really have been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.

You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon... Ah, a first ray of sunshine!

...Art itself may be defined as a single minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.

The first things to study are form and values. For me, these are the things that are the basics of what is serious in art.