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

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

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

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

"The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A puny body weakens the soul."

"The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it."

"I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"With an apple I will astonish Paris."

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

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

"I have sworn to die painting."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"I want to die painting."

"Art is a harmony parallel with nature."

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

"We live in a rainbow of chaos."

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

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

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

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

"The awareness of our own strength makes us modest."

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

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

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

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

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