Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us - a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!
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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.
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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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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.
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The large majority of people are asleep and do not wish to wake up.
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The great artist is the simplifier.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.