Paul Cezanne Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

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

Pleasure must be found in study.

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.

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

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

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.

I want to die painting.

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

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

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

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

The contour eludes me.

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

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

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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