Paul Cézanne

You surely know that there is only one painter in the world, and it's me . . .

The tints are the strength of a painting.

There is one minute of that world that passes! To paint it in its reality! and forget everything for that.

I am the pioneer of the artistic route that I have discovered.

When color reaches it greatest richness, form reaches its plenitude.

The coloring feelings that give light are causes of abstractions that do not allow me to cover my canvas or to pursue the outlining of objects--the contact points are tenuous and delicate, and it follows that my painting stays incomplete.

As a painter, I become more lucid facing nature, but at home, the concretization of my feelings is always very painful .. . Here, near the river, the motives are manifold, the same subject seen under different angle becomes a study object of the most intense interest and so variable that I believe I could be kept busy for months without changing my place, just by leaning down sometimes more to the right, sometimes more to the left.

In art everything is theory, developed and applied in contact with nature.

Will I arrive at the goal I have sought and pursued for so long? . . . I thus continue my studies . . . . I always study with nature, and I seem to progress so slowly.

For the artist, to see is to conceive, and to conceive is to compose.

For the artist is not aware of his emotions, the way the bird modulates his sounds: He composes!

One does not paint souls, one paints bodies . . .

There is a color logic . . . The painter must obey it and nothing else.

Never the brain's logic; if he succumbs to it, he is lost. Always the logic of the eyes. If he feels correctly, he will think correctly.

Painting is, first of all, optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think. Nature, when we respect her, always tells us what she means.

We are an iridescent chaos.

Nature must be treated through the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, the whole placed in perspective.