Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Cezanne

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French artist Paul Cezanne.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

French - Artist | January 19, 1839 - October 22, 1906

Source: Wikipedia

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

Paul Cezanne

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

Paul Cezanne

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

Paul Cezanne

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

Paul Cezanne

The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.

Paul Cezanne

Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?

Paul Cezanne

My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life.

Paul Cezanne

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

Paul Cezanne

The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.

Paul Cezanne

There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.

Paul Cezanne

I'll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs.

Paul Cezanne

I want to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all.

Paul Cezanne

I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.

Paul Cezanne

Keep good company - that is, go to the Louvre.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

A puny body weakens the soul.

Paul Cezanne

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Paul Cezanne

You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest.

Paul Cezanne

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

Paul Cezanne

Here, on the river's verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left.

Paul Cezanne

We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

Paul Cezanne

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me.

Paul Cezanne

Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.

Paul Cezanne

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Paul Cezanne

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

Paul Cezanne

Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted.

Paul Cezanne

I allow no one to touch me.

Paul Cezanne

Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones.

Paul Cezanne

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.

Paul Cezanne

A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I'm every inch a painter.

Paul Cezanne

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.

Paul Cezanne

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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.

Paul Cezanne

I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

Paul Cezanne

I've come to the conclusion that it's not really possible to help others.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Paul Cezanne

Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.

Paul Cezanne

I have sworn to die painting.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

Paul Cezanne

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.

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne

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

Paul Cezanne