Paul Gauguin Quotes
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There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.
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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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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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Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.
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Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
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Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
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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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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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Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.
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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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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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Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene.
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By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.
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Civilization is paralysis.
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I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.