Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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But I must work on in full calmness and serenity... The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it, because I have walked on the earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express a sincere human feeling. So this work is the aim-and through concentration upon that one idea, everything one does is simplified. Now the work goes slowly-a reason the more to lose no time.
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I was certainly going the right way for a stroke when I left Paris. I paid for it nicely afterwards! When I stopped drinking, when I stopped smoking so much, when I began to think again instead of trying not to think - Good Lord, the depression and the prostration of it! Work in these magnificent natural surroundings (Arles) has restored my morale, but even now some efforts are too much for me: my strength fails me.
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In trees, I see expression and soul
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The large majority of people are asleep and do not wish to wake up.
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What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.
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But for one's health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.
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An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.
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Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
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Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.
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Close friends are truly life's treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.
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The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.
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I lost my job as an art salesman. It was the customer's fault. He wanted to buy the wrong paintings.
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Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.
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I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
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Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.
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That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn't alter the fact that I'm bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!
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If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.
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It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.
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I believe more and more that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of His sketches that has turned out badly.
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Well, I dare not allow myself any illusions, and I am afraid it may never happen that Father and Mother will really appreciate my art. It is not their fault; we do not see the same things with the same eyes, or have the same thoughts raised in us by them. They will never be able to understand what painting is.