Paul Gauguin Quotes
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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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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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There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.
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Art a mad search for individualism.
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It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.
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A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!
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Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.
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Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
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Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.
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Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene.
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The critics can say stupid things and we can enjoy them, if we have the legitimate feeling of superiority - the satisfaction of a duty accomplished.
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Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
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It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.
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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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Civilization is paralysis.
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Lacking many of the essential implements, it irritated me to be reduced to impotence in the face of artistic projects to which I had passionately given myself.
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In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?
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Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.
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Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.
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We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
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A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.
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I was aware that on my skill as a painter would depend the physical and moral possession of the model.