Top 120 Paul Cézanne Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I paint as if I were Rothschild.”

— Paul Cézanne

102. “An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.”

— Paul Cézanne

103. “The sun penetrates me soundlessly like a distant friend that stirs up my laziness, fertilizes it. We bring forth life.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

105. “I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.”

— Paul Cézanne

106. “Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.”

— Paul Cézanne

107. “To be sure an artist wishes to raise his standard intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain in obscurity. Pleasure must be found in the studying.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

111. “Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

113. “It is necessary to introduce light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, and a sufficient amount of blues, to obtain an airy feeling.”

— Paul Cézanne

114. “You have no idea how life-giving it is to find around one a youth that agrees not to bury one on the spot.”

— Paul Cézanne

115. “I am still searching for the expression of those confused sensations that we bring with us at birth.”

— Paul Cézanne

116. “Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.”

— Paul Cézanne

117. “Pleasure must be found in study.”

— Paul Cézanne

118. “I am a pupil of Pissarro.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

120. “I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.”

— Paul Cézanne

121. “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 Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

123. “The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.”

— Paul Cézanne

124. “I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.”

— Paul Cézanne

125. “I advance all of my canvas at one time.”

— Paul Cézanne

126. “When a picture isn’t realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one!”

— Paul Cézanne

127. “The painter unfolds that which has not been seen.”

— Paul Cézanne

128. “All the theories mess you up inside.”

— Paul Cézanne

129. “Studying the model and realizing it is sometimes very slow in coming for the artist.”

— Paul Cézanne

130. “One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art – and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

133. “Two sittings a day of my models and I’m totally exhausted.”

— Paul Cézanne

134. “My nervous system is very much weakened – nothing but painting in oil can keep me going.”

— Paul Cézanne

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

— Paul Cézanne

136. “Pure drawing is an abstraction.”

— Paul Cézanne