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Love

• Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
• Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.

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Beauty

• I want to paint the way a bird sings.
• I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.
• I will do water – beautiful, blue water.
• My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.

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Passion

• Etretat is becoming more and more amazing. Now is the real moment: the beach with all its fine boats; it is superb, and I am enraged not to be more skillful in rendering all this. I would need two hands and hundreds of canvases.
• Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all – my head is bursting…
• I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.
• My head is bursting with it.

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Hard work

• I’m not performing miracles, I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint…
• It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

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Challenge

• No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself.

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Color

• Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
• Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

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Light

• For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually.

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Nature

• Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.
• I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
• It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm.
• It seems to me, when I see nature, that I see it ready made, completely written.
• I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.
• My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.
• There, the grand lines of mountain and sea are admirable, and apart from the exotic vegetation that is here, Monte Carlo is certainly the most beautiful spot of the entire coast: the motifs there are more complete, more picturelike, and consequently easier to execute.

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Flowers

• I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
• I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
• I must have flowers, always and always.
• It took me a long time to understand my water lilies.. .I planted them for pleasure, and grew them without thinking of painting them.. You don’t absorb a landscape in a day.. .And then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette.

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Seeing

• I can only draw what I see.
• No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

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More

• I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.
• If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!

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