Paul Cezanne Quotes

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

Paul Cezanne

#2. All my compatriots are asses compared to me.

Paul Cezanne

#3. All the theories mess you up inside.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#8. I advance all of my canvas at one time.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#10. If I think, everything is lost.

Paul Cezanne

#11. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#13. Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#15. When I start thinking, all is lost.

Paul Cezanne

#16. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#17. Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

Paul Cezanne

#18. We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Paul Cezanne

#19. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#20. I want to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#27. I wish to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

#28. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#33. Pure drawing is an abstraction.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#37. Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!

Paul Cezanne

#38. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#39. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#42. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#43. Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos ...

Paul Cezanne

#44. I allow no one to touch me.

Paul Cezanne

#45. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#47. There is no model, there is only color.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#50. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#51. 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?

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#53. The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#55. An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#57. I have sworn to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

#58. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#60. 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 ...

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#64. I am a pupil of Pissarro.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#66. Nature is the best instructor.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#68. Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#70. The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#73. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#74. I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Paul Cezanne

#75. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#76. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#78. Chatter about art is almost always useless.

Paul Cezanne

#79. See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#84. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#91. Art is a harmony parallel with nature

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#99. If I think, I am lost.

Paul Cezanne

#100. I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

Paul Cezanne