Quotes About Paul Cezanne

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#6. All the theories mess you up inside.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#14. I paint as if I were Rothschild.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#17. If I think, everything is lost.

Paul Cezanne

#18. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#21. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#24. 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

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 The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#27. We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Paul Cezanne

#28. 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

#29. I want to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#32. With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Paul Cezanne

#33. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#41. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

#43. I wish to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

#44. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#49. Pure drawing is an abstraction.

Paul Cezanne

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. I allow no one to touch me.

Paul Cezanne

#64. A puny body weakens the soul.

Paul Cezanne

#65. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#68. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#71. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

#73. 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

#74. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#78. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

#80. The contour eludes me.

Paul Cezanne

#81. I have sworn to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

#82. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#85. Sometimes I imagine colors as if they were living ideas, being of pure reason with which to communicate. Nature is not on the surface, it is deep down.

Paul Cezanne

#86. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#90. I am a pupil of Pissarro.

Paul Cezanne

#91. 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

#92. 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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#94. Nature is the best instructor.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

#97. 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

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne