Paul Gauguin Quotes
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My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.
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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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There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme.
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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 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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Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.
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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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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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Oh mysterious world... I have become better for having understood and having loved thy human soul - a flower which has ceased to bloom and whose fragrance no one henceforth will breathe.
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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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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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It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.
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Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!
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There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.
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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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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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A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.
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It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.
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Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
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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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Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.
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Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
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Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.