Paul Gauguin Quotes
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Art a mad search for individualism.
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All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.
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Go on working, freely and furiously, you will make progress and sooner or later your worth will be recognised, if you have any.
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Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
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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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Slyly, banteringly, but also overbearingly, the critic - the one who does not swallow anything whole, who waits until posterity has consecrated it before... howling - is among those who howl their admiration the way they howl their insults: don't be afraid, don't tremble - the beast doesn't have any nails or teeth, or even brain: it is stuffed.
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Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?
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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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Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth
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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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What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?
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If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I'd rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!
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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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Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!
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In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists
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Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
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Having the certitude of a succession of days... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.
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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.
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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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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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Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
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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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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 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.