Top 135 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Gauguin

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Civilization is what makes you sick.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.

Art = a mad search for individualism.

Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool.

By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.

Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.

Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth

I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.

The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

Poor artist! You gave away part of your soul when you painted the picture which you are now trying to dispose of.

If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.

A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.

In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?

With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.

In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.

In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.

Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.

Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene.

My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.

Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.

The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.

Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!

Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!

I have come to an unalterable decision - to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.

I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.

A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.

I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.

Oh yes! he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland - those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.

Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.