Vincent Van Gogh
But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will.Collection: People
The great artist is the simplifier.Collection: Writing
The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else, but keep heart, it will turn out all right.Collection: Heart
Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.Collection: Men
In my view, I am often immensely rich, not in money, but (although just now perhaps not all the time) rich because I have found my metier, something I can devote myself to heart and soul and that gives inspiration and meaning to my life.Collection: Inspiration
Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.Collection: Light
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, ‘You can't do a thing’. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can't' once and for all.Collection: Real
Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh, he makes men instead of statues.Collection: Artist
The sunflower is mine, in a way.Collection: Sunflower
Someday death will take us to another star.Collection: Stars
At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.Collection: Stars
I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.Collection: Beautiful
I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say "he feels deeply, he feels tenderly".Collection: Art
So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.Collection: World
Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man's soul.Collection: Art
You have to first experience what you want to expressCollection: Want
I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.Collection: Sublime
Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.Collection: Art
Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.Collection: Wife
Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.Collection: Emotional
I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.Collection: Care
As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.Collection: Art
The sadness will last forever.Collection: Sad
One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.Collection: Sad
The majority of (painters), because they aren't colorists, do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South (of France) and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirsCollection: Eye
There is something intimate about painting I cannot explain to you ? but it is so delightful just for expressing one's feelings.Collection: Feelings
I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada.Collection: Work
Painting demands an intelligent model.Collection: Intelligent
It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.Collection: Easy
The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.Collection: Beautiful
I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.Collection: Art
The best pictures are always those one dreams of when one is smoking a pipe in bed, but which never get done. But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature.Collection: Dream
Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.Collection: Form
How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.Collection: Lying
An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without The Graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor.Collection: Heart
Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously does not allow that resistance to put him off his stride; on the contrary, it is that much more of a stimulus to fight for victory.Collection: Fighting
Life is not long for anybody, and the problem is only to make something of it.Collection: Long
It must be a good thing to die conscious of having performed some real good, and to know that by this work one will live, at least in the memory of some, and will have left a good example to those that come after. A work that is good-it may not be eternal, but the thought expressed in it is, and the work itself will certainly remain in existence for a long, long time; and if afterwards others arise, they can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and do their work in the same way.Collection: Memories
There certainly is an affinity between a person and his work, but it is not easy to define what this affinity is, and on that question many judge quite wrongly.Collection: Judging
Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.Collection: Insecurity
a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.Collection: Different
It is the painting that makes me so happy these days.Collection: Art
What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came.Collection: Heart
Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us - a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!Collection: Art
Art is but imitation of nature.Collection: Art
It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one's youth.Collection: Gains
It seems to me it's a painter's duty to try to put an idea into his work.Collection: Artist
That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter.Collection: Way
Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.Collection: Brother