“Everything changes, even stone.”

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

It is only too easy to catch people’s attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.

Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.

It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Light is the most important person in the picture.

I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

I still don’t know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.

When I look at nature I feel as if I’ll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you’re working.

Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is fog that gives it its magnificent amplitude its regular and massive blocks become grandiose in that mysterious mantle.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

You learn in life that the only person you can really correct and change is yourself.

But times do change and move continually.

I also take it as granted that every created thing, and consequently the created monad also, is subject to change, and indeed that this change is continual in each one.

On her daughter: And she’s going through all these changes. You know, it’s just crazy times.

Human beings all change. Not what they are but who they are. We have the power to change what we do with our life and turn it into our destiny.

When a nominee doesn’t get 60 votes, you shouldn’t change the rules, you should change the nominee.

You can complain about what you can’t change or you can focus on what you can change.

You are the only person you can actually change.