“I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.”

The more I live, the more I regret how little i know.

One’s better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one’s own. In fact it’s a terrible business and the task is a hard one.

If only the weather would improve, there’d be hope of some work, but every day brings rain.

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.

Everything changes, even stone.

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 don’t panic. The same thing applies to me as to everybody else, so I’m given to euphoria and despair. And I would say that I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.

Your spirit is the part of you that seeks meaning and purpose. It’s the part drawn to hope, that will not give in to despair.

We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.

There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.

Ay, do despise me, I’m the prouder for it; I like to be despised.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.