You must forgive me for continually coming back to the same thing; but I believe in the logical development of everything we see and feel through the… - Paul Cézanne

Until the war [between France and Germany] as you know, my life was a mess. I wasted it. It was only at l'Estaque, when (1870-1871) I thought things over, that I really understood Pissarro, a painter like myself.. .He was a determined man. I was overcome by a passion for work. It wasn't that I hadn't been working before, I was always working. But what I always missed, you know, was a comrade like you..

Make others feel the same way about it. Without their realizing it! That's the meaning of art.. .Yes, what I'm aiming for is the logical development of what we see and feel when we observe nature; only then I'm concerned with the process, processes being for us no more than simple ways of getting the public to feel what we ourselves are feeling, and of making our point. The great artists we admire have done no more.. .Shall we have lunch?

.. (large and famous painting of Dutch 17th century painter Rembrandt.. ..the grandiose - I don't say it in bad part - grows tiresome after a while. There are mountains like that; when you stand before them you shout Nom de Dieu, but for every day a simple little hill does well enough. Listen Monsieur Vollard, if the 'Raft of the Medusa' of Théodore Géricault hung in my bedroom, it would make me sick.