“Art first of all is optical. That’s where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.”

See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.

People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.

Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

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.

Drawing and color are by no means two different things. As you paint, you draw… When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.

The painter unfolds that which has not been seen.

I allow no one to touch me.

If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.

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

Right now a moment of time is passing by! We must become that moment.

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.

Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.

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.

It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.