Paul Cezanne Quotes

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.

To be sure an artist wishes to raise his standard intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain in obscurity. Pleasure must be found in the studying.

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.

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

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

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

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

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.

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

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

The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

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

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

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.

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

The painter unfolds that which has not been seen.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish to die painting.

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

When I start thinking, all is lost.

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

I am a consciousness. The landscape thinks itself through me.

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.

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

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.

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

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

When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one!

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

To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric by looking and working.

If I think, I am lost.

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

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.

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

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 ...

I want to die painting.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

There is no model, there is only color.

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

Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything ... A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together ... but no programme, no instruction in painting ... drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting - the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting..

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

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

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

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

If I think, everything is lost.

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.

Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas?

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

The contour eludes me.

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

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

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

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

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.

I have sworn to die painting.

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.

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

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

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

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

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.

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

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 the theories mess you up inside.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.