“Everything we look at disperses and vanishes. doesn't it? Nature is always the same, and yet its appearance is always changing... Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity. Everything, you understand. So I join together nature's straying hands.... From all sides, here there and everywhere, I select colours, tones and shades; I set them down, I bring them together.... They make lines, they become objects – rocks, trees – without my thinking about them.... But if there is the slightest distraction, the slightest hitch, above all if I interpret too much one day, if I'm carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday's, if I think while I'm painting, if I meddle, then woosh!, everything goes to pieces.”

—  Paul Cézanne

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 148, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

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Paul Cézanne photo
Paul Cézanne 62
French painter 1839–1906

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