Love makes one calmer about things, and that way, one is fit for one’s work.
Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you’re put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.
Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us – a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!
If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.
I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing.
So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.
Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
I have walked the earth for thirty years and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.
There is no such thing as an ugly woman.
There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even – the French air clears up the brain and does good – a world of good.
There is peace even in the storm.
As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.
I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.
Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague.
There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.
Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me.
When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant color, well arranged, resplendent.
To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one’s fling from time to time, smoke one’s pipe, and drink one’s coffee in peace.