We live in a rainbow of chaos.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

Only useless things are indispensable.

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

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

Good taste is as tiring as good company.

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

Work isn’t to make money; you work to justify life.

I want to die painting.

My ass contemplates those who talk behind my back.

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

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

Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery.

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

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

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting...

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

The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

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

Youth doesn’t reason, it acts. The old man reasons and would like to make the others act in his place.

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The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this...

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

A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.

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.

My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.

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.

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

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

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

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.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

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

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

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

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

Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent.

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.

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

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.

I have tried to do what is true and not ideal.