Paul Gauguin Quotes
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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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There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.
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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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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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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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Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
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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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Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.
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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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It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.
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A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!
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Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.
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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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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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A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.
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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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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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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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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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Civilization is paralysis.
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Without delay I began work, without hesitation and all of a fever.
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Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.