The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

"To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them."

"The pain passes, but the beauty remains."

"Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world."

"One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism."

"Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness."

"Regularity, order, desire for perfection destroy art. Irregularity is the basis of all art."

"What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story."

"I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black."

"I like a painting which makes me want to stroll in it."

"Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world."

"When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished."

"I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters."

"Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits."

"The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion."

"If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself."

"I need to feel the excitement of life stirring around me, and I will always need to feel that."

"I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver."

"There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more."

"Why should beauty be suspect?"

"Paint with joy - with the same joy that you would make love to a woman."

"I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn't turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it."

"-last words about painting, age 78... I think I'm beginning to learn something about it."

"We are in a period of searchers rather than of creators."

"You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat."

"The advantage of growing old is that you become aware of your mistakes more quickly."

"Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character."

"It's with my brush that I make love."

"One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity."

"White does not exist in nature."

"Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art."

"You don't talk about paintings, you look at them."

"People love to be nice, but you must give them the chance."

"The more they measure, the more they realize how much the Greeks departed from regular and banal lines in order to produce their effect."

"I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it."

"About 1883 something like a break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of 'impressionism,' and I had come to realize that I did not know how to paint or draw."

"I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child."

"Everybody has their reasons."

"And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums."

"You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time."

"You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous."

"If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous."

"An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature."

"I just keep painting till I feel like pinching. Then I know it's right."

"Nothing costs so little, goes so far, and accomplishes so much as a single act of merciful service."

"I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw."

"There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is ineffable."

"Out-of-doors there is a greater variety of light than in the studio, where the light is always the same. But that is just the trouble; one is carried away by the light, and besides, one can't see what one is doing."

"I have a horror of the word 'flesh', which has become so shopworn.Why not 'meat'whilethey're about it? What I like is skin, a young girl's skin that is pink and shows that she has a good circulation."

"People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters."