Cezanne's Quotes

#1. One of Cezanne's unfinished paintings ... appears to be a completed work even though only a few strokes of paint have been put down. My methods are similar ... I expect each of my paintings to appear whole in every stage.

Christopher Willard

#2. The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Jane Hirshfield

#3. Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.

Robert Hughes

#4. Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

Arthur Koestler

#5. To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

W. H. Auden

#6. Pure drawing is an abstraction.

Paul Cezanne

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#12. 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

#13. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#14. 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

#15. 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.

Paul Cezanne

#16. Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style ...

Charles Tomlinson

#17. The idea of selling a Cezanne to buy a Morisot seems explosively contentious.

Michael Scott

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#22. 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

#23. If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees.

Robert Motherwell

#24. I wish to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

#25. He wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in a painting. You have to do it from inside yourself ... You could do it if you wanted to fight for it. If you'd lived right with your eyes.

Ernest Hemingway,

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

Paul Cezanne

#27. Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information. Only Cezanne could get away with a system.

Wolf Kahn

#28. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#32. 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

#33. It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

Jerry Saltz

#34. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

#36. The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

Wendell Berry

#37. 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

#38. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)

Malcolm Gladwell

#39. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

#41. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#47. 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

#48. A puny body weakens the soul.

Paul Cezanne

#49. I allow no one to touch me.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#55. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#58. 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

#59. The people who do better and better work are people who are never satisfied. Cezanne would say, 'I think I've accomplished something,' but then he would immediately add, 'But it's not enough.

David Galenson

#60. The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism.

Alfred H. Barr Jr.

#61. If I think, everything is lost.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#64. I paint as if I were Rothschild.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#69. Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.

Henri Matisse

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#73. All the theories mess you up inside.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#77. With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#82. Cezanne is one of the most liberal artists I have ever seen ... he grants that everyone may be as honest and as true to nature from their convictions; he doesn't believe that everyone should see alike.

Mary Cassatt

#83. Cezanne was fated, as his passion was immense, to be immensely neglected, immensely misunderstood, and now, I think, immensely overrated.

Walter Sickert

#84. Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.

Clive Bell

#85. The painter unfolds that which has not been seen.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#88. Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate ... Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

Paul Cezanne

#89. There is no such thing as starting where Cezanne left off. You have to start where he started ... at the beginning.

Kimon Nicolaides

#90. The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me. I make it an
object, let it project itself and endure within my painting....I become the subjective
consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.

Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#93. I want to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

#94. 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

#95. We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#97. If Picasso drips, I drip ... For a long while I was with Cezanne, and now I am with Picasso.

Arshile Gorky

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

Paul Cezanne

#99. In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

Bob Dylan

#100. 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