Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.

One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism.

If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous.

It's with my brush that I make love.

In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

The purpose of painting is to decorate the walls. Therefore it has to be as rich as possible

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.