Top 425 Quotes & Sayings by Vincent Van Gogh - Page 4

Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And let us not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil.

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

But I must work on in full calmness and serenity... The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it, because I have walked on the 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 tendency in art, but to express a sincere human feeling. So this work is the aim-and through concentration upon that one idea, everything one does is simplified. Now the work goes slowly-a reason the more to lose no time.

Love always causes trouble, that's true, but in its favour, it energizes.

No, no thought to the winnings. One loves because one loves.

Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.

To stick to the present and not let it pass without drawing some profit from it, that's what I think duty is. ...let us perservere as far as we can rather today than tomorrow.

For the great doesn't happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.

My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.

I wanted to make people think of a totally different way of living from that which we, educated people, live. I would absolutely not want anyone to find it beautiful or good without a thought.

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals.

Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

Spring is the fresh green of young corn and the pink blush of blossoms. Autumn contrasts the yellowed foilage with violet hues. Winter is the white of snow against its black forms ... Summer is the contrast of blues and the golden bronze of the corn.

Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis.

To express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of Kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of light tone against a somber background; to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.

There are colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other like man and woman.

As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.

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.

I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.

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

The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

Occasionally, in times of worry, I've longed to be stylish, but on second thought I say no-just let me be myself-and express rough, yet true things with rough workmanship.

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.

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.

I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.

But for one's health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.

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.

It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

I always think photographs abominable, and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love. Those photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love.

If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse.

Here everything is so wholly what I consider beautiful. In other words, there is peace here.

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

To die for the sake of dying - I prefer to die of passion than to die of boredom!

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.

My brushwork is quite unsystematic. I slam the paint on in all sorts of ways and leave each result to take care of itself.

It astonishes me already when I compare my condition today with what it was a month ago. Before that I knew well enough one could fracture one's legs and arms and recover afterward, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

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.

I tried to express through red and green the terrible passions of humanity.

In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.

I believe more and more that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of His sketches that has turned out badly.

I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.

What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is ... for us humans.

I lost my job as an art salesman. It was the customer's fault. He wanted to buy the wrong paintings.

The victory one would gain after a whole life of work and effort is better than one that is gained sooner.

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

In trees, I see expression and soul

What color is in a picture, enthusiasm is in life.

Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone.

There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!

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.

To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.

I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though defeated here and there; and even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things go differently from the expected, it is necessary to take heart again and new courage. For 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. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, who with irresistible force urges us towards more loving.

...to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin.

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

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.