Paul Cezanne Quotes

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

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

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

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.

One had to immerse oneself in one's surroundings and intensely study nature or one's subject to understand how to recreate it.

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

Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.

I allow no one to touch me.

It is necessary to introduce light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, and a sufficient amount of blues, to obtain an airy feeling.

Right now a moment of time is passing by!... We must become that moment.

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

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

What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.

Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things.

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

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

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

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

It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.

See nature in terms of the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

When I start thinking, all is lost.

I have sworn to die painting.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!

Sometimes I imagine colors as if they were living ideas, being of pure reason with which to communicate. Nature is not on the surface, it is deep down.

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all... feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique - all these are in the middle.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

There is no model, there is only color.

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

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

If I think, everything is lost.

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

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.

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

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

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

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

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

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our mids from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Time and reflection, moreover, little by little modify our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

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

Design and color are not distinct and separate. As one paints, one draws. The more the colors harmonize, the more the design takes form. When color is at it's richest, form is at its fullest.

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

The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.

It's not just about looking and copying, it's about feeling too

Time and reflection change the sight little by little 'till we come to understand.