A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Don’t be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.

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

Keep good company – that is, go to the Louvre.

I have sworn to die painting.

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

I want to die painting.

The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.

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

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.

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

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

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

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

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

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

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

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

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

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

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

I allow no one to touch me.

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

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

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

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

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

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

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

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.

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

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

I’ll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs.

A puny body weakens the soul.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really possible to help others.

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

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

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.

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

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.

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

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

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.

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

Two sittings a day of my models and I’m totally exhausted.

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

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

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

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

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