Top 100 Gogh Quotes
#1. Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh's starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven's Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine.
Daniel Bor
#2. If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.
Juliet Stevenson
#3. A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.
Mary Oliver
#4. For the rest of their lives, the Van Gogh children would view any walk in public as a kind of fashion parade for the soul
Steven Naifeh
#5. I was starting to think of her as the "Goth Van Gogh" on a good day or "Vampira" on a bad one. She took a little getting used to.
Judith Fertig
#7. Van Gogh would have to cut his cock off to make an impression nowadays
Dean Cavanagh
#8. My soul is like my worn-out Van Gogh t-shirt; threadbare and full of holes
J. Matthew Nespoli
#9. Vincent van Gogh's mother painted all of his best things. The famous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by Van Gogh's dealer.
Roy Blount Jr.
#10. When a 'Life of Brian' comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of Theo van Gogh, it will be a huge step forward.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#11. My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#12. I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said - that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.
Erwin McManus
#13. Your work may be great and not make its way into the big picture ... like Van Gogh ... so who's to say what's good and bad?
Frank Gehry
#14. I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.
John Olsen
#15. Michael Jordan didn't become a great basketball player because he wanted to do product endorsements. Van Gogh didn't become a great painter because he dreamed that one day his paintings would sell for $50 million.
Jack D. Schwager
#16. Van Gogh, among others, believed in the religion of art, which, whatever else it involved, made it clear that art is more than the sum of its material characteristics and not simply a reflection of everyday life.
Donald Kuspit
#17. I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
Joni Mitchell
#18. What I liked most was that George had class, the way he walked and talked, reading Shakespeare and all those books. He knew about van Gogh and Picasso, he gave me a book about Dali. And just the way he conducted himself, you could see it. He was very elegant in his manners.
Bruce Porter
#19. If cupcakes were art; Kate's would be Van Gogh's
C.T. Mitchell
#20. Is an artist only the one whose paintings are purchased? I think that an artist is a man who always seeks and never finds a final answer.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#21. I always liked the Van Gogh story because I was terribly involved in that.
Vincente Minnelli
#22. I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.
David Lynch
#23. Curling leaves and twining branches outside my bay window look like a Van Gogh in the starlight - there is a river out there somewhere
Jeffrey Rasley
#24. I have got an iPad, what a joy! Van Gogh would have loved it, and he could have written his letters on it as well.
David Hockney
#26. One association with the arts that I vividly remember was a magazine called Normal Instructor, a teachers' magazine, that Miss George would hold up with illustrations of great artworks like [Vincent] van Gogh and Rembrandt [van Rijn].
Paul Smith
#27. I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.
Dick Bruna
#28. They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art.
Robin Leach
#29. An impressionist is the one who does not paint like everyone, does not obey the rules and attitude.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#30. Art and resistance are great together. That's what art's made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn't cut off his ear because he was selling well.
Albert Brooks
#31. Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.
Bill Griffith
#32. The terrorists who committed the 2003 Istanbul attacks were locals, that is, Turks. And when filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the Netherlands last year, the murderer and his supporters were also part of the Muslim community.
Otto Schily
#33. I once gave a girl a bloody fake ear in a Tiffany jewelry box with a letter that said, will you Gogh to prom with me?
Matthew Gray Gubler
#34. For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist's room at Arles. Madness is not a new invention.
Dan Simmons
#35. Oh, my job ... I sacrificed my whole life ... and almost lost my mind.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#36. When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.
Adam Gopnik
#37. What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist?
Peter D. Kramer
#38. I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.
Maurice Sendak
#39. One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it. - Vincent Van Gogh
Laurie A. Helgoe
#40. 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
#41. Wasn't he the one who sliced off his ear and mailed it to his girlfriend?"
"Van Gogh," said Varen, in a monotone that suggested he might be in pain.
"Van Gogh," Gwen said, leaning away, waving the apple. "Edgar Allan Poe. Close enough!
Kelly Creagh
#42. It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#43. Autism's a very big spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, Einstein would probably be labeled autistic, Steve Jobs, half of Silicon Valley, you know, Van Gogh. And at the other end of the spectrum, you got much more severe handicaps where they never learn to speak.
Temple Grandin
#44. It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
Robert Hughes
#45. To the memory of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, El Greco, and many others who came before me as well as those who will come after. We are one. Thank you.
Luther E. Vann
#46. I thought maybe I could become like the next Van Gogh. I bought a sunflower and painted it, and it looked like the work of a 6-year-old.
Takeshi Kitano
#48. I'm not sure that Van Gogh got up in the morning and looked at the crows and the bizarre clouds and went damn that's a good painting, you know? No, he considered shooting himself, and one day he did.
Mick Farren
#49. Everyone said to Vincent van Gogh, "You can't be a great painter, you only have one ear." And you know what he said? "I can't hear you.
Steve Carell
#50. A chord that becomes a melodious delusion,
In polar discrepancy from blue to yellow painted,
In yellow I existed, with digoxin's deadly illusion,
Like Van Gogh's stars in a bright night untainted.
Selina A. Mahmood
#51. We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.
Alice Walker
#52. 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. - Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to His Brother
Hokusai
#53. I don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.
Jim Carrey
#54. I think that Van Gogh is really the ultimate crazy artist that we all think of.
Ellen Forney
#55. 'Tell me, please,' Van Gogh asked, 'is it justifiable that a person wastes his only life by selling worthless paintings for fools?
Irving Stone
#56. Monet, Manet, Sisley, Renoir, Van Gogh and others went outside to paint for one simple reason - it looks different outside.
Mike Svob
#57. No one has called any of my pictures obscene ever but I have been constantly blamed for an even greater sin - the ugliness.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#58. Vincent Van Gogh. You know what everyone said to him? You can't paint, you've only got one ear.
Know what he said back? "I can't hear you." - Michael Scott
Michael Scott
#59. My wife was the first art collector in the family, and I didn't become interested until around 1973. The first important artwork we bought was a Van Gogh drawing of two peasant houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
Eli Broad
#60. A genial and cultured Arab, Ameen Rihani, whose English is perfect and whose eloquence is astounding. He will discuss with equal eagerness and knowledge the merits of Picasso or Van Gogh, or the Zionist question, or the British achievements in Arabia.
Kenneth Williams
#61. Some of the world's most talented people are introverts. Without them we wouldn't have the Apple computer, the theory of relativity or Van Gogh's sunflowers.
Susan Cain
#62. Vincent Van Gogh, who said to the hat salesman, I like it, but it keeps sliding over my ear. Never got a dinner!
Red Buttons
#64. Van Gogh on Christmas:
And now we're slowly heading towards winter, and many dread it, but Christmas is wonderful, it's like the moss on the roofs and like the pine and the holly and the ivy in the snow.
Isleworth, 10 November 1876
Liesbeth Heenk
#65. If Delacroix discovered painting when he had neither teeth nor health, I can discover it when I have neither teeth nor the mind.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#67. The significant element that is common to Rivera, Siqueros, Picasso, Pollock, Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo is the expression of pain.
Billy Cannon
#68. Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#69. What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures but that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for.
John Russell
#70. I paint only what I love.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#71. My app is the same juicy paint used by Vincent Van Gogh; my screen is the woven canvas of Titian. Painting by hand, I've come to figure, is a certain kind of love.
Robert Genn
#72. Mozart. Vivaldi. Van Gogh. Stretched their genius on struggle, stress and survival.
Billy Cannon
#73. [Vincent Van Gogh] 'Oh Theo, don't you think I'm the black sheep, do you?'
[Theo Van Gogh] 'I'm more inclined to consider you as an ass.'
Irving Stone
#74. Only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long, tumultuous stretches;
look what intensity did to poor Van Gogh!
John Tagliabue
#75. Watercolor is not my way of expression.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#76. Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.
Jerry Saltz
#77. Letter from Van Gogh to Gauguin: Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us ... a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!! [Letter 739, Arles, 21 January 1889]
Liesbeth Heenk
#78. There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that ... the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
John Berger
#79. I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.
Irving Stone
#80. Layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads
Chad Harbach
#81. Herman Melville was supposed to be an accountant. Van Gogh was meant to be an art dealer. I was meant to take the train into New York and work for a bank. To be an artist, you have to say goodbye to your family.
Don McLean
#82. You cannot be the good all the time - sometimes it is necessary to get angry.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#83. I feel close to Marvin Gaye, Vincent van Gogh, because nobody appreciated his work until he was dead. Now it's worth millions.
Tupac Shakur
#84. No wonder Van Gogh blasted his head off. Crows and sunlight. Idle zero. Zero eating your guts like an animal inside, letting you shit and fuck and blink your eyes, but nothing, a nothing.
Charles Bukowski
#85. In general, you have great artists who have died far too early and who have left great cultural impact. If you look at people like Vincent van Gogh or Jean-Michel Basquiat-there's a long, long list of artists who have died in tragic circumstances, and far, far too early.
Simon De Pury
#86. Van Gogh was so under appreciated in his time, he sold only one of his 900 paintings while alive. Posthumously, he became one of the most famous artists of all time and his work is now considered priceless. Oh the irony.
Vincent Van Gogh
#87. Van Gogh was asked how he created such beautiful paintings. He said I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams.
Bob Proctor
#88. It would be horrible if there was no competition. It's what people want to see - they either like you or they don't. Not everybody likes Van Gogh. Or Bob Dylan! So you have Neil Young ... or Ozzy Osbourne.
Kate Hudson
#89. Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.
Annie Dillard
#90. Learn to trust yourself. That's very vital ... Just stand with yourself. Remember, in his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only two paintings. I personally sold even fewer.
Eric Idle
#91. The whole idea of comparing climbers is ludicrous. It would be like sitting Van Gogh down with Rembrandt and saying, Ready, get set, go.
Pat Ament
#92. Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.
Van, whores don't want
ears
they want
money.
I guess that's why you were
such a great
painter: you
didn't understand
much
else.
Charles Bukowski
#93. Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.
Piet Mondrian
#94. My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.
Philip Schultz
#95. Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Charles Bukowski
#96. I'm one of the more pessimistic cats on the planet. I make Van Gogh look like a rodeo clown.
Dennis Miller
#97. Wherever at least two art lovers meet, Vincent Van Gogh's name is holy.
Irving Stone
#98. I felt like it was inevitable that I was going to fail in life and die young. So I was frantically scrambling to document my stunts and pack my message into a bottle. I thought maybe I could be discovered after I'd died, like Van Gogh.
Steve-O
#99. Artists are mostly shits of the worst order. You wouldn't want one living next door to you. Think about it: Vincent Van Gogh living next door, coming over to borrow your ear and a cup of sugar every morning-Good God!
Stan Brakhage
#100. It's only a few nutcases who do art for themselves, like Van Gogh.
David Bailey
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