Top 120 Paul Cézanne Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Paul Cézanne

2. “Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn’t it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.”

— Paul Cézanne

3. “Everything is about to disappear. You’ve got to hurry up if you still want to see things.”

— Paul Cézanne

4. “Time and reflection change the sight little by little ’till we come to understand.”

— Paul Cézanne

5. “Art is a harmony parallel with nature.”

— Paul Cézanne

6. “Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.”

— Paul Cézanne

7. “If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.”

— Paul Cézanne

8. “The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.”

— Paul Cézanne

9. “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

11. “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.”

— Paul Cézanne

12. “You have to hurry up if you want to see something, everything disappears.”

— Paul Cézanne

13. “The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.”

— Paul Cézanne

14. “The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.”

— Paul Cézanne

15. “There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.”

— Paul Cézanne

16. “If I think, everything is lost.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

18. “Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.”

— Paul Cézanne

19. “The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.”

— Paul Cézanne

20. “There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.”

— Paul Cézanne

21. “See nature in terms of the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

23. “To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.”

— Paul Cézanne

24. “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 Cézanne

25. “Nature is the best instructor.”

— Paul Cézanne

26. “Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!”

— Paul Cézanne

27. “Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else – by color.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

29. “I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.”

— Paul Cézanne

30. “Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos...”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

34. “It’s not just about looking and copying, it’s about feeling too.”

— Paul Cézanne

35. “With an apple I will astonish Paris.”

— Paul Cézanne

36. “Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the roots of the world.”

— Paul Cézanne

37. “Sometimes I imagine colors as if they were living ideas, being of pure reason with which to communicate. Nature is not on the surface, it is deep down.”

— Paul Cézanne

38. “When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

40. “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.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

42. “It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.”

— Paul Cézanne

43. “It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture...”

— Paul Cézanne

44. “What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.”

— Paul Cézanne

45. “Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole’s everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

47. “An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.”

— Paul Cézanne

48. “You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

50. “Chatter about art is almost always useless.”

— Paul Cézanne