The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

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

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

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.

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

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

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.

Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.

I have sworn to die painting.

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

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.