“To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.”

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.

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

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

All the theories mess you up inside.

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

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

If I think, everything is lost.

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

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.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

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

Luxury is the opportunity to experience quality, be it a place, a person or an object.

Sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings.

A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.