Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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Whatever plan one makes, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere.
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Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
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Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
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Purity of soul and impurity of body can go together.
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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 we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.
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I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
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I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject; but still I don't invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find it already there. It's a question of picking out what one wants from nature.
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I want to get to the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply.
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To die for the sake of dying - I prefer to die of passion than to die of boredom!
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What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
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I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada.
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One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers – by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.
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I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say "he feels deeply, he feels tenderly".
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Art demands constant observation.
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Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance...I'm going like a painting-locomotive.
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Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
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It must be a good thing to die conscious of having performed some real good, and to know that by this work one will live, at least in the memory of some, and will have left a good example to those that come after. A work that is good-it may not be eternal, but the thought expressed in it is, and the work itself will certainly remain in existence for a long, long time; and if afterwards others arise, they can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and do their work in the same way.
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I am an artist... It's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, 'I know all about it. I've already found it.' As far as I'm concerned, the word means, 'I am looking. I am hunting for it. I am deeply involved.'
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The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.
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So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.
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Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.
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I see more and more that my work goes infinitely better when I am properly fed, and the paints are there, and the studio and all that... I wish I could manage to make you really understand that when you give money to artists, you are yourself doing an artist's work, and that I only want my pictures to be of such a quality that you will not be too dissatisfied with your work.
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Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.