Paul Cezanne Quotes

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Because of this the representation I'm interested in is of those things only the eye can touch.

We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it.

The necessary condition for an image is sight.

Vision, I say, is related to light itself. But of this sensation and the things pertaining to it, I pretend to understand but little; and since even a long time would not suffice to explain that trifle, or even to hint at an explanation, I pass over this in silence.

But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.'

I was shown a picture by Cézanne of a blank wall of a house, which he had made instinct with the most delicate lights and colours.

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.

O the eye's light is a noble gift of Heaven! All beings live from light, each fair created thing; the very plants turn with a joyful transport to the light.

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.

For the Rays, to speak properly, have no Colour. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.

If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.

Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

The essence of painting has actually always been to make it [the universal] plastically perceptible through colour and line.

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.

There is indeed no such thing in life as absolute darkness; one's eyes revolt and hasten to fill the vacuum by floating in sparks, dream patterns, figures whimsical and figures grotesque, shifting and clad in complementary colors, to appease the indignant cups and rods of the retina.

The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.