“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.”

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

It is not about painting life, it is about making the painting alive.

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

When I start thinking, all is lost.

Nature is the best instructor.

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

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

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.

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

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

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.

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

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.

Pleasure must be found in study.

The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one’s own strength makes one modest.

I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

He who puts a product upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of color. It is simply a survival of the fittest.

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.