Paul Cezanne Quotes

Studying the model and realizing it is sometimes very slow in coming for the artist.

The strong experience of nature... is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future work.

Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one's own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles.

The transposition that a painter makes with an original vision gives to the representation of nature a new interest.

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

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

A puny body weakens the soul.

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

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

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

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

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

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.

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

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

All the theories mess you up inside.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

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

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

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

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

When I start thinking, all is lost.

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

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.

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

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

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

I allow no one to touch me.

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

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

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

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

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.

I have sworn to die painting.

I wish to die painting.

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

Perhaps I was born too early. I was more the painter of your generation than of mine.

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

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.