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paul cezanne Quotes



Quotes by paul cezanne - (92 quotes)

Paul Cezanne - From the Abstraction category:

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

Paul Cezanne - From the Acceptance category:

The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one's own strength makes one modest. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Aging category:

I am old and ill, and I have sworn to die painting. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Application category:

With an apple I will astonish Paris. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Art category:

Art is a harmony parallel with nature. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Art category:

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all... feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique - all these are in the middle. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Artists category:

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Artists category:

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

Paul Cezanne - From the Awareness category:

One had to immerse oneself in one's surroundings and intensely study nature or one's subject to understand how to recreate it. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Books category:

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Boredom category:

I thought that by leaving Aix I should leave behind the boredom that pursues me. Actually I have done nothing but change my abode and the boredom has followed me. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Chaos category:

We live in a rainbow of chaos. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Colour category:

-on Eugene Delacroix...
His is the greatest palette of France and no one beneath our skies possessed to a greater extent than he both the serene and the pathetic, the vibration of color. We all paint through him. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Colour category:

There is no model; there is only color. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Colour category:

Nature is more depth than surface. Hence the need to introduce into our light vibrations represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Colour category:

When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Colour category:

-to Camille Pissarro...
The sun is so terrific here that is seems to me as if the objects were silhouetted not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown and violet. I may be mistaken, but this seems to me to be the opposite of modelling. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Colour category:

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Complexity category:

I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Comprehension category:

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

Paul Cezanne - From the Confidence category:

-to Victor Chocquet...
I should have wished to possess the intellectual equilibrium that characterizes you and permits you to achieve without fail the desired end... Chance has not favoured me with an equal self-assurance, it is the only regret I have about things of this earth. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Construction category:

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Criticism category:

The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path – the concrete study of nature – to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Critics category:

-to Emile Bernard...
Do not be an art critic, but paint, therein lies salvation. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Difficulty category:

I have made some progress. Why so late and with such difficulty? Is art really a priesthood that demands the pure in heart who must belong to it entirely? (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Difficulty category:

The contour eludes me. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Dissatisfaction category:

I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Dissatisfaction category:

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

Paul Cezanne - From the Drawing category:

Drawing and colour are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more the colour harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Education category:

Nature is the best instructor. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Ego category:

All my compatriots are asses compared to me. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Ego category:

-to his mother...
I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and you know that the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Emotion category:

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Emotion category:

I'd like to combine melancholy and sunshine... There's a sadness in Provence which no one has expressed... I'd like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky, like Poussin... (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Experience category:

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. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Experience category:

The knowledge of the means of expressing our emotions is only acquired through very long experience. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Expression category:

Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Expression category:

One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Finishing category:

I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools... I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Fire category:

When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one! (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Friendship category:

The sun penetrates me soundlessly like a distant friend that stirs up my laziness, fertilizes it. We bring forth life. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Friendship category:

Keep good company - that is, go to the Louvre. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Genius category:

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Harmony category:

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Harmony category:

When they [paintings] are done right, harmony appears by itself. The more numerous and varied they are, the more the effect is obtained and agreeable to the eye. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Immortality category:

Everything we see falls apart, vanishes. Nature is always the same, but nothing in her that appears to us, lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us the taste of her eternity. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Innocence category:

Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos... (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Interest category:

-to his son...
Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Life category:

I wish to die painting. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Light category:

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else – by color. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Light category:

An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Masters category:

We may all descend from Pissarro. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Methodology category:

I advance all of my canvas at one time. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Methodology category:

Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Models category:

Studying the model and realizing it is sometimes very slow in coming for the artist. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Mysteries category:

What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Nature category:

I have not tried to reproduce nature: I have represented it. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Nature category:

In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is turned through contact with her. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Nature category:

The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Nature category:

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Obscurity category:

To be sure an artist wishes to raise his standard intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain in obscurity. Pleasure must be found in the studying. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Observation category:

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

Paul Cezanne - From the Originality category:

The transposition that a painter makes with an original vision gives to the representation of nature a new interest. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Originality category:

Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Painting category:

He unfolds, as a painter, that which has not yet been said; he translates it into absolute terms of painting – something other than reality. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Painting category:

Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Pleasure category:

Pleasure must be found in study. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Plein-Air category:

All pictures painted inside in the studio will never be as good as the things done outside. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Portraiture category:

- to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard who changed his pose during the sitting...
You wretch! You've spoiled the pose. Do I have to tell you again you must sit like an apple? Does an apple move? (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Portraiture category:

- after 115 sittings for a portrait of Ambroise Vollard...
I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Profession category:

There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Profession category:

I never know where I am going or where I want to go with this damned profession. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Progress category:

To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric by looking and working. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Satisfaction category:

I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Searching category:

I am still searching for the expression of those confused sensations that we bring with us at birth. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Seeing category:

One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Seeing category:

-on Claude Monet...
Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye! (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Senses category:

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

Paul Cezanne - From the Senses category:

One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art – and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Solitude category:

If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Strength category:

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Subject category:

Fruits... like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Survival category:

My nervous system is very much weakened – nothing but painting in oil can keep me going. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Taste category:

Taste is the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Theory category:

All the theories mess you up inside. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Time category:

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint... We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate... give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Tones category:

There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Tones category:

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

Paul Cezanne - From the Tradition category:

Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas? (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Truth category:

I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Understanding category:

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. (Paul Cezanne)

Paul Cezanne - From the Unknowns category:

The painter unfolds that which has not been seen. (Paul Cezanne)