We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

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

Great art picks up where nature ends.

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

God invented concubinage, Satan marriage.

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.

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

Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god.

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

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

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.