Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.
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Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.
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I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.
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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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Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength ... .
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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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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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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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The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.
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Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.
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For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
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You will say that everyone has seen landscapes and figures from childhood on. The question is: Has everybody also been reflexive as a child? Has everybody who has seen them also loved heath, fields, meadows, woods, and the snow and the rain and the s.
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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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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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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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...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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Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.
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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.
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Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
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There is no blue without yellow and without orange.
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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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Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals.
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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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In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.