Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

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

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

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

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

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

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

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

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

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

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

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

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

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

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

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

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.

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

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

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

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

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

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

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

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

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

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

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

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

I have sworn to die painting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A puny body weakens the soul.

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

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

I want to die painting.

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

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

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.

Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.

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

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

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

I allow no one to touch me.