"I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing."

"He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]"

"On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette."

"In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known."

"Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard."

"Religion is everywhere. It is in the mind, in the heart, in the love you put into what you do."

"If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal."

"The simplest subjects are the immortal ones."

"An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life."

"It is impossible to repeat in one period what was done in another.The pointof view isnotthesame, anymorethan are the tools, the ideals, the needs, or the painters' techniques.""God, the king of artists, was clumsy."

"God, the king of artists, was clumsy."

"Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you from being a genius."

"I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them."

"To express himself well, the artist should be hidden... The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he's done for. The only salvation is to work like a labourer, and not have delusions of grandeur."

"I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall."

"My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit."

"Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period."

"It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre."

"I have no rules and no methods... no secrets."

"The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy."

"What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished."

"The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished."

"A painter who has the feel of breasts and buttocks is saved."

"I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts."

"The purpose of painting is to decorate the walls. Therefore it has to be as rich as possible"

"I have been for forty years discovering that the queen of all colors was black."

"What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples - in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs."

"A fat lot of good it would do if I told you that Titian's courtesans make you want to caress them. Some day you'll see the Titians for yourself, and if they have no effect on you, then you don't understand the first thing about painting. And I wouldn't be able to help you."

"The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater."

"I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime; honours shower upon me from every side; artists pay me compliments on my work; there are many people to whom my position must seem enviable ... But I don't seem to have a single real friend!"