Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.
The critics can say stupid things and we can enjoy them, if we have the legitimate feeling of superiority – the satisfaction of a duty accomplished.
Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.
It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.
Perhaps I have no talent, but all vanity aside – I do not believe that anyone makes an artistic attempt, no matter how small, without having a little – or there are many fools.
With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? – photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won’t be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!
In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.
I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer.
Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised.
I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.
I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.
In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.
A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.
Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow...
Do what you like, so long as it is intelligent.
Don’t paint from nature too much. Art is an abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result.
No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways. It would be needless to point this out if the unscrupulous were not always saying the opposite. It’s so small a thing, the life of man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of the common task. I wish to love, and I cannot. I wish not to love, and I cannot.
Brave as you may be, wise even as you may be, you tremble when the earth trembles. That is a sensation common to everybody and which no one would ever deny.
It takes very little to bring about a woman’s fall, but you have to lift the whole world in order to lift her.
Be stingy of nothing but the name of friend, and take care not to waste your insults.