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Spring is the fresh green of young corn and the pink blush of blossoms. Autumn contrasts the yellowed foilage with violet hues. Winter is the white of snow against its black forms ... Summer is the contrast of blues and the golden bronze of the corn.
Vincent Van Gogh -
I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time... the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.
Vincent Van Gogh
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The sadness will last forever.
Vincent Van Gogh -
Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone.
Vincent Van Gogh -
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.
Vincent Van Gogh -
An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.
Vincent Van Gogh -
It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.
Vincent Van Gogh -
...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
Vincent Van Gogh
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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.
Vincent Van Gogh -
The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.
Vincent Van Gogh -
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.
Vincent Van Gogh -
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.
Vincent Van Gogh -
But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will.
Vincent Van Gogh -
Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.
Vincent Van Gogh
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In trees, I see expression and soul
Vincent Van Gogh -
I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.
Vincent Van Gogh -
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.
Vincent Van Gogh -
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.
Vincent Van Gogh -
What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.
Vincent Van Gogh -
Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.
Vincent Van Gogh