Vincent Van Gogh quotes:

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  • I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

  • In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

  • If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

  • As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

  • Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

  • For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

  • Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

  • It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent.

  • I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

  • I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

  • Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

  • There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

  • Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

  • It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

  • Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

  • I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

  • A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

  • I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

  • I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

  • Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

  • I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

  • Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

  • I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed.

  • If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

  • When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

  • But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

  • The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.

  • The best way to know God is to love many things.

  • The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too

  • One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

  • 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.

  • How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

  • The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

  • Love is eternal, the aspect may change, but not the essence.

  • Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death be like autumn leaves. Rabindranath Tagore What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.

  • 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.

  • I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

  • If you end up falling in love with someone, it's because of them. If you end up hating someone, it's because of you.

  • 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.

  • 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!!!

  • Benjamin Murphy is the best artist since sliced bread.

  • 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.

  • One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

  • One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.

  • I never get tired of the blue sky.

  • So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.

  • I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening...like a light in the midst of the darkness.

  • If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

  • I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada.

  • An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

  • Close friends are truly life's treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones...

  • 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.

  • To express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of Kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of light tone against a somber background; to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.

  • I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.

  • In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.

  • The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.

  • It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

  • 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.

  • But what's your ultimate goal, you'll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.

  • Painting it was hard graft... in addition red, yellow, brown ochre, black, terra sienna, bistre, and the result is a red-brown that varies from bistre to deep wine-red and to pale, blond reddish...

  • As you can see, I am immersing myself in color-I've held back from that until now; and I don't regret it.

  • As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.

  • Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.

  • What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

  • But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions?

  • Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.

  • 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!

  • Van Gogh was so under appreciated in his time, he sold only one of his 900 paintings while alive. Posthumously, he became one of the most famous artists of all time and his work is now considered priceless. Oh the irony.

  • There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

  • The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

  • 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 peace

  • How right it is to love flowers and the greenery of pines and ivy and hawthorn hedges; they have been with us from the very beginning.

  • 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...

  • 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.

  • It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.

  • The great artist is the simplifier.

  • Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

  • 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.

  • I believe it is one's duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love.

  • 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.

  • It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.

  • Only he can be an artist who has a religion all his own - an original way of viewing infinity.

  • 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.

  • Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.

  • 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.

  • Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

  • Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.

  • ... life is too short to do the whole.

  • Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn't come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.

  • It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

  • I don't know if I can convey the postman as I feel him... Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model.

  • 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.

  • Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

  • ...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

  • Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.

  • If you work with love and intelligence, you develop a kind of armour against people's opinions, just because of the sincerity of your love for nature and art. Nature is also severe and, to put it that way, hard, but never deceives and always helps you to move forward.

  • If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.

  • There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you? Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities.

  • 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 theirs

  • The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

  • Modern reality has got such a hold on us that... when we attempt to reconstruct the ancient days in our thoughts...the minor events of our lives tear us away from our meditations, and... thrust us back into our personal [problems]

  • Well, I am ploughing on my canvases as they do on their fields (the peasants). It goes badly enough in our profession - in fact that has always been so, but at the moment it is very bad.

  • The sight of stars always sets me dreaming just as naively as those black dots on a map set me dreaming of towns and villages. Why should these points of light in the firmament, I wonder, be less accessible than the dark ones on the map of France? We take a train to go to Torascon or Roven and we take death to a star.

  • Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

  • It may be true that there is no God here, but there must be one not far off, and at such a moment one feels His presence; which comes to the same as saying (and I readily give this sincere profession of faith): I believe in God, and that it is His wi

  • I am a fanatic! I feel a power within me...a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.

  • There is peace even in the storm

  • What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

  • It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.

  • There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

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