Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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For the great doesn't happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.
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To the one party, woman is always heresy and diabolical. To me, the opposite.
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The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain indebtedness and duty toward it because I have walked this 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 taste in art, but to express a sincere human feeling.
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Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.
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Van Gogh was so under appreciated in his time, he sold only one of his 900 paintings while alive. Posthumously, he became one of the most famous artists of all time and his work is now considered priceless. Oh the irony.
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Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.
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How lovely yellow is! It stands for the sun.
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If I did not succeed I still thought that what I had worked on would be continued. Not immediately. But there are others who believe in things that are true.
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I believe I do much better for the time being by first copying some good things than by working without that foundation
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Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, ‘You can't do a thing’. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can't' once and for all.
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I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.
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Well, I am ploughing on my canvases as they do on their fields (the peasants). It goes badly enough in our profession - in fact that has always been so, but at the moment it is very bad.
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As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.
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To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.
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It may be true that there is no God here, but there must be one not far off, and at such a moment one feels His presence; which comes to the same as saying (and I readily give this sincere profession of faith): I believe in God, and that it is His wi
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What preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way?
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The sight of stars always sets me dreaming just as naively as those black dots on a map set me dreaming of towns and villages. Why should these points of light in the firmament, I wonder, be less accessible than the dark ones on the map of France? We take a train to go to Torascon or Roven and we take death to a star.
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It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.
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The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.
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I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed.
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We are surrounded by poetry on all sides.
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And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.
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There is something intimate about painting I cannot explain to you ? but it is so delightful just for expressing one's feelings.
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I am a fanatic! I feel a power within me...a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.