We live in a rainbow of chaos.

The essence of a man is found in his faults.

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.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

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

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Of course one should not drink much, but often.

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

If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.

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

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Thought is made in the mouth.

I paint things as they are. I don’t comment.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

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

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.