Paul Cezanne Quotes

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

A puny body weakens the soul.

- Paul Cezanne

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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.

- Paul Cezanne

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

I've come to the conclusion that it's not really possible to help others.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

- Paul Cezanne

There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

- Paul Cezanne

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

- Paul Cezanne

I have sworn to die painting.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

- Paul Cezanne

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

I allow no one to touch me.

- Paul Cezanne

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

- Paul Cezanne

I want to die painting.

- Paul Cezanne