Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.
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It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.
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Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance...I'm going like a painting-locomotive.
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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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I've never felt a desire (and I don't believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work... a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.
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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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I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though defeated here and there; and even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things go differently from the expected, it is necessary to take heart again and new courage. For the great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
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Great things do not just happen by impulse, but as a succession of small things linked together.
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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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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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The lamps are burning and the starry sky is over it all.
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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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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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Do not become the slave of your model.
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It interests me tremendously to make copies... I started it by chance and I find it teaches me things.
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As you can see, I am immersing myself in color-I've held back from that until now; and I don't regret it.
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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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My brushwork is quite unsystematic. I slam the paint on in all sorts of ways and leave each result to take care of itself.
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Life is not long for anybody, and the problem is only to make something of it.
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Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would go for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.
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To express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of Kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of light tone against a somber background; to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.
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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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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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No, no thought to the winnings. One loves because one loves.