Vincent Van Gogh
I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.Collection: Inspirational
Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul.....My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul.Collection: Art
One of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you.Collection: Jobs
I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time... the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.Collection: Gratitude
I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing.Collection: Thinking
But for one's health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.Collection: Flower
The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.Collection: Cypresses
Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me.Collection: Music
I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.Collection: Regret
I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin.Collection: Ideas
Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.Collection: Mistress
The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.Collection: Art
When using colors to recreate a general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation. One keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, and that may not be exactly, or far from exactly, like the model.Collection: Color
We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.Collection: Lonely
I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.Collection: Art
Spring is the fresh green of young corn and the pink blush of blossoms. Autumn contrasts the yellowed foilage with violet hues. Winter is the white of snow against its black forms ... Summer is the contrast of blues and the golden bronze of the corn.Collection: Summer
Do not become the slave of your model.Collection: Slave
It astonishes me already when I compare my condition today with what it was a month ago. Before that I knew well enough one could fracture one's legs and arms and recover afterward, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too.Collection: Brain
For the great doesn't happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.Collection: Together
What color is in a picture, enthusiasm is in life.Collection: Color
In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.Collection: Artist
You can't be at the pole and the equator at the same time. You must choose your own line, as I hope to do, and it will probably be color.Collection: Color
To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, who with irresistible force urges us towards more loving.Collection: Believe
The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant color, well arranged, resplendent.Collection: Revenge
I want to do drawings which touch some people... In either figure or landscape I wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.Collection: Sadness
I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.Collection: Mad
I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.Collection: Eye
Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone.Collection: Being Alone
Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares-and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't.'Collection: Broken
As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely.Collection: Painting
I see more and more that my work goes infinitely better when I am properly fed, and the paints are there, and the studio and all that... I wish I could manage to make you really understand that when you give money to artists, you are yourself doing an artist's work, and that I only want my pictures to be of such a quality that you will not be too dissatisfied with your work.Collection: Artist
I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though defeated here and there; and even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things go differently from the expected, it is necessary to take heart again and new courage. For the great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.Collection: Wall
The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.Collection: Trying
There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!Collection: Art
There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.Collection: Air
... life is too short to do the whole.Collection: Time
One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.Collection: Succeed
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.Collection: Men
Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.Collection: Meat
The victory one would gain after a whole life of work and effort is better than one that is gained sooner.Collection: Effort
Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.Collection: Thinking
I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit.Collection: Suffering
...to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?Collection: Dream
People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.Collection: People
What I need is courage, and this often fails me. And it is also a fact that since my disease, when I am in the fields I am overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness to such a horrible extent that I shy away from going out. But this will change all the same as time goes on. Only when I stand a painting before my easel do I feel somewhat alive. Never mind, this is going to change too, for now my health is so good that I suppose the physical part of me will gain the victory.Collection: Loneliness
If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.Collection: Wise
What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.Collection: Believe
I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.Collection: Men
I assure you that there's a lot involved in compositions with figures. ... It's like weaving... you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.Collection: Eye