Vincent Van Gogh
I want to paint what I feel, and feel what I paint.Collection: Want
At one time, the earth was supposed to be flat. Well, so it is, even today, from Paris to Asnieres. But that fact doesn't prevent science from proving that the earth as a whole is spherical. No one nowadays denies it. Well...we are still at the stage of believing that life itself is flat, the distance from birth to death. Yet the probability is that life, too, is spherical and much more extensive and capacious than the hemisphere we know.Collection: Distance
What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.Collection: Death
We are surrounded by poetry on all sides.Collection: Sides
Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.Collection: Love
I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.Collection: Loneliness
Do you know that drawing with words is also an art... ?Collection: Art
The sight of stars makes me dream.Collection: Dream
In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.Collection: Want
The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.Collection: People
Great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.Collection: Great Things
I am a fanatic! I feel a power within me...a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.Collection: Fire
Only when I fall do I get up again.Collection: Fall
If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.Collection: Glasses
Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough.Collection: People
How lovely yellow is! It stands for the sun.Collection: Yellow
One of the hardest things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.Collection: Light
It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.Collection: Art
I am an artist... It's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, 'I know all about it. I've already found it.' As far as I'm concerned, the word means, 'I am looking. I am hunting for it. I am deeply involved.'Collection: Mean
It is the language of nature to which one has to listen.Collection: Listening
You have first to experience what you want to express.Collection: Motivational
I've just kept on ceaselessly painting in order to learn painting.Collection: Order
Even this artistic life, which we know is not real life, appears to me to be so alive and so vital that it would be a form ingratitude not to be content with it.Collection: Real
There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?Collection: People
I see drawings and pictures in the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corner. And my mind is drawn toward these things by an irresistible force.Collection: Drawing
At times it is not easy for me to take up living again.Collection: Easy
I am risking my life for my work, and half my reason has gone.Collection: Gone
I lost my job as an art salesman. It was the customer's fault. He wanted to buy the wrong paintings.Collection: Art
I want to get to the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply.Collection: Men
Love is something eternal.Collection: Love Is
And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.Collection: Soul
But you must love with a sublime , genuine , profound sympathy , with devotion, with intelligence , and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God , that will lead to an unshakeable faith .Collection: Profound
I'll start with small things.Collection: Small Things
If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse.Collection: Horse
I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.Collection: Woe Is Me
I wanted to make people think of a totally different way of living from that which we, educated people, live. I would absolutely not want anyone to find it beautiful or good without a thought.Collection: Beautiful
Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals.Collection: Book
I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better.Collection: God
It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.Collection: Reflection
Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for diner or coffee. And it has been like that form the beginning.Collection: Coffee
We take death to reach a starCollection: Stars
The wheat field has ...poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen. We can only make our pictures speak.Collection: Memories
I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.Collection: Taken
I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter.Collection: Dog
The worse I get along with people the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her.Collection: Nature
Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That's just what artists lack!Collection: Moving
For instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully.Collection: Color
l can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but l cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than l, which is my life — the power to create.Collection: Artist