Vincent Van Gogh
I am always in the hope to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors - colors which marry each other... complement each other as a man and a woman do.Collection: Men
I feel the need of relations and friendship, of affection, of friendly intercourse.... I cannot miss these things without feeling, as does any other intelligent man, a void and a deep need.Collection: Intelligent
If one keeps loving faithfully what is really worth loving, and does not waste one's love on insignificant and unworthy and meaningless things, one will get more light by and by and grow stronger.Collection: Light
I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.Collection: Sunflower
I will not live without love.Collection: Love
The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.Collection: Art
It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.Collection: Suicide
Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.Collection: Regret
Here everything is so wholly what I consider beautiful. In other words, there is peace here.Collection: Beautiful
To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and drink one's coffee in peaceCollection: Coffee
If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.Collection: Baby
It is not only by one's impulses that one achieves greatness, but also by patiently filing away the steel wall that separates what one feels from what one is capable of doing.Collection: Wall
How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.Collection: Lonely
My brushwork is quite unsystematic. I slam the paint on in all sorts of ways and leave each result to take care of itself.Collection: Care
If I succeed in putting some warmth and love into the work, then it will find friends. Carrying on working is theCollection: And Love
I hope I shall be able to make some drawings in which there is something human.Collection: Drawing
There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love, as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning.Collection: Love
I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.Collection: Adventure
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.Collection: Together
The painter of the future will be a colorist unlike anything yet.Collection: Color
I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.Collection: Anxiety
I wish they would take me as I am.Collection: Wish
But on the road that I'm on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don't study, if I don't keep on trying, then I'm lost, then woe betide me. That's how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that's what's needed.Collection: Trying
My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.Collection: Sketchbooks
Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.Collection: Art
To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.Collection: Color
The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain indebtedness and duty toward it because I have walked this earth for thirty years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures — not made to please a certain taste in art, but to express a sincere human feeling.Collection: Gratitude
I always think photographs abominable, and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love. Those photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love.Collection: Character
If you work diligently... without saying to yourself beforehand, 'I want to make this or that,' if you work as though you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupation, you will not always find you do well. But the days you least expect it, you will find a subject which holds its own with the work of those who have gone before.Collection: Shoes
There was a sentence in your letter that struck me, “I wish I were far away from everything, I am the cause of all, and bring only sorrow to everybody, I alone have brought all this misery on myself and others.” These words struck me because that same feeling, just the same, not more nor less, is also on my conscience.Collection: Feelings
But after all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gapCollection: Mistake
Cobalt is a divine color and there is nothing as fine for putting an atmosphere round things. Carmine is the red of wine and is warm and lively like wine. The same goes for emerald green too. It's false economy to dispense with them, with those colors. Cadmium as well.Collection: Wine
If I did not succeed I still thought that what I had worked on would be continued. Not immediately. But there are others who believe in things that are true.Collection: Believe
I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.Collection: Art
When I have a model who is quiet and steady and with whom I am acquainted, then I draw repeatedly 'til there is one drawing that is different from the rest, which does not look like an ordinary study, but more typical and with more feeling.Collection: Drawing
I believe it is one's duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love.Collection: Believe
The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.Collection: Years
Painting is a faith and that it brings with it the duty to pay no heed to public opinion - and that in it one conquers by perseverance and not by giving in.Collection: Perseverance
That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn't alter the fact that I'm bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!Collection: Mistake
Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.Collection: Canvas
We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.Collection: Memories
I believe I do much better for the time being by first copying some good things than by working without that foundationCollection: Believe
You will say that everyone has seen landscapes and figures from childhood on. The question is: Has everybody also been reflexive as a child? Has everybody who has seen them also loved heath, fields, meadows, woods, and the snow and the rain and the s.Collection: Children
To exaggerate the fairness of hair, I come even to orange tones, chromes and pale yellow ... I make a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky.Collection: Stars
In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.Collection: Artistic Life
Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground - yet that ground is very dark.Collection: Dark
I myself believe that there is in every painter's life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.Collection: Believe
To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.Collection: Beautiful
I was certainly going the right way for a stroke when I left Paris. I paid for it nicely afterwards! When I stopped drinking, when I stopped smoking so much, when I began to think again instead of trying not to think - Good Lord, the depression and the prostration of it! Work in these magnificent natural surroundings (Arles) has restored my morale, but even now some efforts are too much for me: my strength fails me.Collection: Drinking