Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.
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The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.
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I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.
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The sunflower is mine, in a way.
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Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures.
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I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.
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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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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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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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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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My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.
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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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We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.
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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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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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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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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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In spite of everything, I shall rise again
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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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And love makes one calmer about many things, and in that way, one is more fit for one's work.
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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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I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.
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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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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.