“I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools… I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing.”

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.