Paul Cezanne quotes:

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

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

  • With an apple I will astonish Paris.

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.

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

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

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

  • I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

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

  • See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.

  • Time and reflection... modify, little by little, our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

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

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

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

  • Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole's everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.

  • The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

  • Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

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

  • The sun penetrates me soundlessly like a distant friend that stirs up my laziness, fertilizes it. We bring forth life.

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

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

  • I want to die painting.

  • Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos...

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

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

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

  • The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.

  • The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.

  • I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

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

  • Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

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

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

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

  • People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.

  • I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

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

  • There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.

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

  • We live in a rainbow of chaos.

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

  • I have sworn to die painting.

  • I should have wished to possess the intellectual equilibrium that characterizes you and permits you to achieve without fail the desired end... Chance has not favoured me with an equal self-assurance, it is the only regret I have about things of this earth.

  • A puny body weakens the soul.

  • I am a pupil of Pissarro.

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

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

  • I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • All my compatriots are asses compared to me.

  • 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.

  • All pictures painted inside in the studio will never be as good as the things done outside.

  • All the theories mess you up inside.

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

  • 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.

  • An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.

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

  • Chatter about art is almost always useless.

  • 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.

  • Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible.

  • Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.

  • I advance all of my canvas at one time.

  • I allow no one to touch me.

  • I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and you know that the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration.

  • I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant.

  • I am still searching for the expression of those confused sensations that we bring with us at birth.

  • I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.

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

  • I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.

  • I paint as if I were Rothschild.

  • I wish to die painting.

  • I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else.

  • I'd like to combine melancholy and sunshine... There's a sadness in Provence which no one has expressed... I'd like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky, like Poussin...

  • If I think, everything is lost.

  • If I think, I am lost.

  • 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.

  • In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is turned through contact with her.

  • It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

  • Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.

  • Long live the sun which gives us such beautiful color.

  • May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.

  • Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

  • My nervous system is very much weakened - nothing but painting in oil can keep me going.

  • 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.

  • Nature is the best instructor.

  • One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art - and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois.

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

  • One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression.

  • One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction.

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

  • Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

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