Paul Cezanne Quotes

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

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

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

You have to hurry up if you want to see something, everything disappears.

I want to die painting.

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

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

Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.

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

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

Keep good company - that is, go to the Louvre.

I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools... I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing.

Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.

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

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

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the roots of the world.

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.

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

Pure drawing is an abstraction.

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate...Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also.

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

All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.

You have no idea how life-giving it is to find around one a youth that agrees not to bury one on the spot.

The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path - the concrete study of nature - to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations.

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

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

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

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

There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.

Drawing and color are by no means two different things. As you paint, you draw... When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.

Fruits ... like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen.

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

If I think, I am lost.

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

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

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

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.

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

Taste is the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals.

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture...we merge in an iridescent chaos.

Knowledge of the means to express our emotion is essential- and is acquired only after a very long experience.

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

You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.