Paul Cezanne Quotes

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

What comes will also go. What always is will alone remain.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

Nothing lives long Only the earth and mountains

Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

How much can come And much can go, And yet abide the world!

The river where you set your foot just now is gone-those waters give way to this, now this.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.

The real difference between God and human beings is that God cannot stand continence. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of day, than he wishes for something quite different and sweeps it all away. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, waking in the dawn of the morning, in the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, sleeping in the cold night's arms.

Time stays, we go.

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral.