Quotes from Paul Cezanne

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

I wish to die painting.

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

Time and reflection... modify, little by little, our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

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

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

I allow no one to touch me.

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.

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

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

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

I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.

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

Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things.

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

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

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

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

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

The strong experience of nature... is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future work.

Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one's own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles.

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

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