Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter.
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How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.
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The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.
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The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.
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Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.
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The majority of (painters), because they aren't colorists, do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South (of France) and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs
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In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.
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Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.
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Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.
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It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one's mind.
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Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.
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If your inner voice is telling you that you can't paint, by all means, hurry up and paint and silence the voice.
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It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.
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...to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
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To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, who with irresistible force urges us towards more loving.
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I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn't come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.
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If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
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I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.
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Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.
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As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.
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One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music.
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I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.
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It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.
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The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.