Good painters imitate nature, but bad ones spew it up.

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.

In the vaunted works of Art The master stroke is Nature's part.

..and wanting to force nature to say things, making trees twist and rocks frown, as Gustave Doré does, or even painting it like Leonardo da Vinci, that's literature too. There's logic of colour, damn it all! The painter owes allegiance to that alone. Never to the logic of the brain; if he abandons himself to that logic, he's lost.. .Painting is first and foremost an optical affair. The stuff of our art is there, in what our eyes are thinking.. .If you respect nature, it will always unravel its meaning for you.

The painter strives and competes with nature.

Nature moves me deeply; I paint nature (now) only in a different way..

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

In the vaunted works of Art The master-stroke is Nature's part. 5.

There is something in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is the essential. You come to Nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.