Top 100 Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
#1. I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#2. I assure you that there's a lot involved in compositions with figures ... It's like weaving ... you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.
Vincent Van Gogh
#3. I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.
Vincent Van Gogh
#5. I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.
Vincent Van Gogh
#8. It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.
Vincent Van Gogh
#9. I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter ...
Vincent Van Gogh
#10. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
Vincent Van Gogh
#11. Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would go for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.
Vincent Van Gogh
#12. Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh, he makes men instead of statues.
Vincent Van Gogh
#13. It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.
Vincent Van Gogh
#14. Well, do you know what I hope for, once I allow myself to begin to hope? [ ... ] That you find in your love for people something not only to work for, but to comfort and restore you when there is a need.
Vincent Van Gogh
#16. The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
Vincent Van Gogh
#17. To die for the sake of dying - I prefer to die of passion than to die of boredom!
Vincent Van Gogh
#18. Painting is a faith and that it brings with it the duty to pay no heed to public opinion - and that in it one conquers by perseverance and not by giving in.
Vincent Van Gogh
#21. Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me.
Vincent Van Gogh
#22. That is how I look at it; to continue, to continue, that is what is necessary.
Vincent Van Gogh
#23. How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.
Vincent Van Gogh
#24. I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away
Vincent Van Gogh
#26. It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.
Vincent Van Gogh
#27. I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
Vincent Van Gogh
#29. For loneliness, worries, difficulties, the unsatisfied need for kindness and sympathy - that is what is hard to bear ...
Vincent Van Gogh
#30. In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.
Vincent Van Gogh
#32. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#33. The painter of the future will be a colorist unlike anything yet.
Vincent Van Gogh
#34. It quite often makes me feel sad that painting's like a bad mistress one might have, who's always spending, spending and it's never enough.. [Letter 630, Arles, 23 June 1888]
Vincent Van Gogh
#35. Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.
Vincent Van Gogh
#36. When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
Vincent Van Gogh
#37. Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.
Vincent Van Gogh
#38. That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter.
Vincent Van Gogh
#40. I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.
Vincent Van Gogh
#41. Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man's soul.
Vincent Van Gogh
#43. Even this artistic life, which we know is not real life, appears to me to be so alive and so vital that it would be a form ingratitude not to be content with it.
Vincent Van Gogh
#44. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#45. The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.
Vincent Van Gogh
#46. How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?
Vincent Van Gogh
#47. There are often beams in our eye that we know not of. Let us therefore ask that our eye may become single, for then we ourselves shall become wholly single.
Vincent Van Gogh
#48. I felt my energy return and that I said to myself, in any event I'll recover from it, I'll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I'll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me.
Vincent Van Gogh
#49. So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one's soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke coming from the top of the chimney, and go on their way.
Vincent Van Gogh
#50. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#51. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#53. It seems to me it's a painter's duty to try to put an idea into his work.
Vincent Van Gogh
#54. If one keeps loving faithfully what is really worth loving, and does not waste one's love on insignificant and unworthy and meaningless things, one will get more light by and by and grow stronger.
Vincent Van Gogh
#55. T has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don't know the artistic side of a painting.
Vincent Van Gogh
#56. If I succeed in putting some warmth and love into the work, then it will find friends. Carrying on working is the
Vincent Van Gogh
#58. My brushwork is quite unsystematic. I slam the paint on in all sorts of ways and leave each result to take care of itself.
Vincent Van Gogh
#59. What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.
Vincent Van Gogh
#61. It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.
Vincent Van Gogh
#62. Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make an arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully.
Vincent Van Gogh
#64. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#65. I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.
Vincent Van Gogh
#66. The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.
Vincent Van Gogh
#67. Fortunately for me, I know well enough what I want, and am basically utterly indifferent to the criticism that I work to hurriedly. In answer to that, I have done some things even more hurriedly theses last few days.
Vincent Van Gogh
#70. A likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.
Vincent Van Gogh
#71. I myself believe that there is in every painter's life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.
Vincent Van Gogh
#72. To the one party, woman is always heresy and diabolical. To me, the opposite.
Vincent Van Gogh
#73. Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success. - Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh
#74. The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
Vincent Van Gogh
#75. To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones ...
Vincent Van Gogh
#76. 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.'
Vincent Van Gogh
#77. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#78. Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#79. If one were to say but few words, though ones with meaning, one would do better than to say many that were only empty sounds, and just as easy to utter as they were of little use.
Vincent Van Gogh
#80. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#81. I am always doing what I can't do so I may learn how to do it.
Vincent Van Gogh
#82. I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours.
Vincent Van Gogh
#83. La tristesse durera toujours.
[The sadness will last forever.]
Vincent Van Gogh
#84. Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.
Vincent Van Gogh
#87. Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.
Vincent Van Gogh
#88. The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant color, well arranged, resplendent.
Vincent Van Gogh
#89. You will say that everyone has seen landscapes and figures from childhood on. The question is: Has everybody also been reflexive as a child? Has everybody who has seen them also loved heath, fields, meadows, woods, and the snow and the rain and the s.
Vincent Van Gogh
#90. Future generations will probably be able to enlighten us on this very interesting subject, and then science itself - with all due respect - may reach conclusions that are more or less in keeping with Christ's sayings about the other half of our life.
Vincent Van Gogh
#91. 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?
Vincent Van Gogh
#92. Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough.
Vincent Van Gogh
#94. The laws of color are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.
Vincent Van Gogh
#95. But after all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gap
Vincent Van Gogh
#96. But on the road that I'm on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don't study, if I don't keep on trying, then I'm lost, then woe betide me. That's how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that's what's needed.
Vincent Van Gogh
#98. If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
Vincent Van Gogh
#99. But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions?
Vincent Van Gogh
#100. What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is ... for us humans.
Vincent Van Gogh
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