We live in a rainbow of chaos.

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

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

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

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

I have sworn to die painting.

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

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

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

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.

The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.

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

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

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

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

I allow no one to touch me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

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

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

A puny body weakens the soul.

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

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

Right now a moment 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....

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

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

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

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

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

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

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

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

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

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

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.

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

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

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

Art is a harmony parallel with nature

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