Vincent Van Gogh Quotes

One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.

To the one party, woman is always heresy and diabolical. To me, the opposite.

It interests me tremendously to make copies... I started it by chance and I find it teaches me things.

To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not something that actually exists?

And love makes one calmer about many things, and in that way, one is more fit for one's work.

Surely the true path is to dive deep into nature.

As you can see, I am immersing myself in color-I've held back from that until now; and I don't regret it.

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.

To paint nature you must be in it a long time.

I want to do drawings which touch some people... In either figure or landscape I wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.

One should arrive at leading one's conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.

What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.

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.

Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.

To know life, one must love many things.

It is not only by one's impulses that one achieves greatness, but also by patiently filing away the steel wall that separates what one feels from what one is capable of doing.

At times it is not easy for me to take up living again.

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

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.

I've never felt a desire (and I don't believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work... a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.

It is good to love many things

What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man... I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares-and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't.'

But by fighting the difficulties in which one finds oneself, an inner strength develops from within our heart, which improves in life's fight.

The more ugly, old, nasty, ill, and poor I become the more I want to get my own back by producing vibrant, well-arranged, radiant colour.

I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.

Whatever plan one makes, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere.

A woman is not old as long as she loves and is loved

The painter of the future will be a colorist unlike anything yet.

I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter.

People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.

Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.

The sight of stars makes me dream.

I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.

You have to first experience what you want to express

Do not think too deeply about these things - gradually they will become clearer to you

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

For instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully.

Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That's just what artists lack!

l can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but l cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than l, which is my life — the power to create.

The worse I get along with people the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her.

If I were to think of and dwell on disastrous possibilities, I could do nothing. I throw myself headlong into my work, and come up again with my studies.

Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.

In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart

Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength ... .

One can never study nature too much and too hard

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?

It was Richepin who said somewhere, 'The love of art means loss of real love'... True, but on the other hand, real love makes you disgusted with art.