Paul Cezanne Quotes - Page 5

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.

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

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

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

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 my compatriots are asses compared to me.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.