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I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.
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The more you love, the more you suffer.
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I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.
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In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.
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Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.
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Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures.
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Painting it was hard graft... in addition red, yellow, brown ochre, black, terra sienna, bistre, and the result is a red-brown that varies from bistre to deep wine-red and to pale, blond reddish.
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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.
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In spite of everything, I shall rise again
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If one keeps loving faithfully what is really worth loving, and does not waste one's love on insignificant and unworthy and meaningless things, one will get more light by and by and grow stronger.
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For me work is an absolute necessity, indeed I can't really drag it out, I take no more pleasure in anything than in work, that's to say, pleasure in other things stops immediately and I become melancholy if I can't get on with the work.
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For loneliness, worries, difficulties, the unsatisfied need for kindness and sympathy - that is what is hard to bear.
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I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.
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Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.
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I see drawings and pictures in the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corner. And my mind is drawn toward these things by an irresistible force.
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I felt my energy return and that I said to myself, in any event I'll recover from it, I'll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I'll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me.
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And love makes one calmer about many things, and in that way, one is more fit for one's work.
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My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.
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The sunflower is mine, in a way.
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I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
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But what's your ultimate goal, you'll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.
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If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.
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In my view, I am often immensely rich, not in money, but (although just now perhaps not all the time) rich because I have found my metier, something I can devote myself to heart and soul and that gives inspiration and meaning to my life.
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I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.