"Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment."
"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. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value."
"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."
"I am driven more and more frantic by the need to render what I experience. Working so slowly I become desperate, but the further I go the more I see that one must work very hard to succeed in rendering what I am looking for: 'Instantaneity', especially the envelope, the same light that diffuses everywhere and, more than ever, things come easily and at once disgust me."
"The motif is insignificant for me; what I want to represent is what lies between the motif and me."
"Once more I have undertaken things which are impossible to do; water with grasses waving in depths...It's wonderful to see but it drives you mad to want to do it. But I am always trying things like that."
"When you go out to paint try to forget what object you have before you - a tree, a house, a field or whatever. 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 emerges as your own naive impression of the scene before you."
"I tell myself that anyone who says he has finished a canvas is terribly arrogant. Finished means complete, perfect, and I toil away without making any progress, searching, fumbling around, without achieving anything much."
"Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat.. I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found - the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible."
"Everything that is painted directly and on the spot always has a force, a power, a vivacity of touch that cannot be re-created in the studio."
"Since the appearance of Impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red... But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections."
"Monet is just an eye - but God, what an eye!"