Creativity Quote by Paul Cezanne

Cezanne turns a social maxim into a museum directive, and the slyness is the point. "Keep good company" usually means curate your friends; he reroutes it to objects, to the dead, to the enduring. The dash works like a painterly cut: first the moral advice, then the real prescription. If you want to become someone worth being around, spend time with what has already proved it can survive taste, fashion, and scandal.

The Louvre, in Cezanne's lifetime, wasn’t just a tourist stop. It was the state’s grand filing cabinet of greatness, a canon-making machine where a provincial painter could measure himself against Poussin’s architecture, Chardin’s hush, Delacroix’s fever. For a generation of artists pushing against academic rules, the museum was both adversary and training partner. You go there not to be obedient, but to steal intelligently: composition, discipline, the long-view patience that modern life keeps trying to short-circuit.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to the romantic myth of solitary genius. Cezanne is often cast as the hermit of Aix, grinding away toward modernism alone. Here he admits the opposite: art is a conversation across centuries, and you enter it by listening first. "Good company" becomes a practical ethics of attention. Stand in front of serious work long enough, and your eye gets honest; your ambition gets specific. That’s the real lesson hiding inside the joke.