"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."