Paul Cezanne quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Paul Cezanne on Wise Famous Quotes.

The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one's own strength makes one modest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All my compatriots are asses compared to me.

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

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

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

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.

When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also.

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

Nature is the best instructor.

I have sworn to die painting.

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

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

I wish to die painting.

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

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

Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

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

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

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

If I think, everything is lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no model, there is only color.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Art is a harmony parallel with nature

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

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

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

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

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

All the theories mess you up inside.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasure must be found in study.

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

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

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

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

I want to die painting.

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

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.

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

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

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

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you see a red tree, paint it bright red.

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

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

If I think, I am lost.

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

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

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The painter unfolds that which has not been seen.

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

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

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

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.

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