Paul Gauguin
Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.Collection: Photography
Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.Collection: Done
I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.Collection: Writing
How do you see those tree?... They are yellow. Well then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.Collection: Blue
Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.Collection: Doors
A meter of green is greener than a centimeter.Collection: Green
Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.Collection: Art
Oh yes! he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland - those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.Collection: Fog
In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.Collection: Order
The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.Collection: Time
The single most powerful tool for winning a negotiation is the ability to get up and walk away from the table without a dealCollection: Powerful
Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature.Collection: Work
Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.Collection: Mean
By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.Collection: Real
Civilization is paralysis.Collection: Art
Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool.Collection: Firsts
In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.Collection: Suggestions
I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.Collection: Dare
Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worthCollection: People
And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.Collection: Dream
In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?Collection: Men
Poor artist! You gave away part of your soul when you painted the picture which you are now trying to dispose of.Collection: Artist
Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?Collection: Drawing
I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.Collection: Nature
The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.Collection: Powerful
Proficiency in art is a contract with your self and the empowerment of your self. Not all of us demand or even desire proficiency, but for those who do it's necessary to temper the influence of groups. And while some artists think history is bunk, the historical evidence is overwhelming: "In my isolation I grow stronger."Collection: Art
With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.Collection: Thinking
Oh mysterious world... I have become better for having understood and having loved thy human soul - a flower which has ceased to bloom and whose fragrance no one henceforth will breathe.Collection: Flower
Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.Collection: People
When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.Collection: Soul
A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.Collection: Art
Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows.Collection: Light
All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.Collection: Freedom
Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.Collection: Night
In art one is concerned with the condition of the spirit for three quarters of the time; one must therefore care for oneself if he wishes to make something great and lasting.Collection: Art
Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.Collection: Art
There are tonalities which are noble and others which are vulgar, harmonies which are calm or consoling, and others which are exciting because of their boldness.Collection: Noble
Having the certitude of a succession of days... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.Collection: Beautiful
It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.Collection: Simple
It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.Collection: Men
My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist!Collection: Money
The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain.Collection: Confidence
In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiaristsCollection: Art
I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the worldCollection: Doors
Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy antique beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature.Collection: Light
I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.Collection: Funny
A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.Collection: Thinking
A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.Collection: Dream
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!Collection: Photography