Paul Gauguin Quotes
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Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
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Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second... You see the sequence.
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Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
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In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
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Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.
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There are tonalities which are noble and others which are vulgar, harmonies which are calm or consoling, and others which are exciting because of their boldness.
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I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer.
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Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.
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Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy antique beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature.
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It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
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Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.
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The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.
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Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
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There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme.
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Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
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The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.
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There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.
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The single most powerful tool for winning a negotiation is the ability to get up and walk away from the table without a deal
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Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.
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In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?
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Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.
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A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!
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However depressed I may be I am not in the habit of giving up a project without having tried everything, even the 'impossible', to gain my end.
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The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain.