Top 100 Quotes About Van Gogh
#1. Here everything is so wholly what I consider beautiful. In other words, there is peace here.
Vincent Van Gogh
#2. I believe that one thinks much more soundly if the thoughts arise from direct contact with things, than if one looks at things with the aim of finding this or that in them.
Vincent Van Gogh
#3. Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.
Vincent Van Gogh
#4. Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#5. I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#6. It may be true that there is no God here, but there must be one not far off, and at such a moment one feels His presence; which comes to the same as saying (and I readily give this sincere profession of faith): I believe in God, and that it is His wi
Vincent Van Gogh
#7. 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
#8. Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously does not allow that resistance to put him off his stride; on the contrary, it is that much more of a stimulus to fight for victory.
Vincent Van Gogh
#9. Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
Vincent Van Gogh
#10. What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came.
Vincent Van Gogh
#11. And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
Vincent Van Gogh
#13. Well, I am ploughing on my canvases as they do on their fields (the peasants). It goes badly enough in our profession - in fact that has always been so, but at the moment it is very bad.
Vincent Van Gogh
#14. 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
#15. No, no thought to the winnings. One loves because one loves.
Vincent Van Gogh
#16. I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
Vincent Van Gogh
#17. 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
#18. I keep on making what I can't do yet in order to learn to be able to do it.
Deborah Heiligman
#19. 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
#20. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#21. I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.
Vincent Van Gogh
#22. I paint only what I love.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#23. The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.
Vincent Van Gogh
#24. 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
#26. I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.
Vincent Van Gogh
#27. I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better.
Vincent Van Gogh
#28. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#29. Mozart. Vivaldi. Van Gogh. Stretched their genius on struggle, stress and survival.
Billy Cannon
#34. I want to get to the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply.
Vincent Van Gogh
#36. The more I become decomposed, the more sick and fragile I am, the more I become an artist.
Vincent Van Gogh
#37. Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
Vincent Van Gogh
#38. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#39. [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
#40. Only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long, tumultuous stretches;
look what intensity did to poor Van Gogh!
John Tagliabue
#41. 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.
Vincent Van Gogh
#42. The majority of (painters), because they aren't colorists, do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South (of France) and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs
Vincent Van Gogh
#43. It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.
Vincent Van Gogh
#44. How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.
Vincent Van Gogh
#45. To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and drink one's coffee in peace
Vincent Van Gogh
#46. What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.
Vincent Van Gogh
#47. Watercolor is not my way of expression.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#48. I myself am quite absorbed by the delicate yellow, delicate soft green, delicate violet of a ploughed and weeded piece of soil.
Vincent Van Gogh
#50. Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.
Vincent Van Gogh
#51. I am risking my life for my work, and half my reason has gone.
Vincent Van Gogh
#52. What am I in the eyes of most people? A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true, I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.
Vincent Van Gogh
#53. No blue without yellow and without orange, and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely.
Vincent Van Gogh
#54. 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
#55. I lost my job as an art salesman. It was the customer's fault. He wanted to buy the wrong paintings.
Vincent Van Gogh
#56. 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
#57. I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter ...
Vincent Van Gogh
#58. Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.
Vincent Van Gogh
#59. It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.
Vincent Van Gogh
#60. Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.
Vincent Van Gogh
#61. One begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order to be true to nature, and one concludes by working quietly from one's own palette alone, and then nature is the result.
Vincent Van Gogh
#62. I want to do drawings which touch some people ... In either figure or landscape I wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.
Vincent Van Gogh
#63. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
Vincent Van Gogh
#64. 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
#65. The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.
Vincent Van Gogh
#66. 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
#67. I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
Vincent Van Gogh
#68. Whatever plan one makes, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere.
Vincent Van Gogh
#70. There are two ways of reasoning about painting: how to do it and how not to do it; how to d it with great deal of drawing and not much colour, how not to do it with a great deal of colour and not much drawing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#71. 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
#72. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
Vincent Van Gogh
#73. In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#74. 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
#75. Periodically throughout his life, he would seek comfort in his troubles by lurching into the wilderness, only to find more loneliness there and end up returning to the world in search of the human companionship that always eluded him, even in childhood, even in his own family
Steven Naifeh
#76. Layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads
Chad Harbach
#77. We spent our whole lives in unconsous excercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words
Vincent Van Gogh
#78. It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.
Vincent Van Gogh
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. One should not evoke violence by acting fearful.
Theo Van Gogh
#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. I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada.
Vincent Van Gogh
#85. I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.
Vincent Van Gogh
#87. The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.
Vincent Van Gogh
#88. I am a fanatic! I feel a power within me ... a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.
Vincent Van Gogh
#89. In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.
Vincent Van Gogh
#90. 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
#91. I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed.
Vincent Van Gogh
#92. 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
#93. The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
Vincent Van Gogh
#95. To die for the sake of dying - I prefer to die of passion than to die of boredom!
Vincent Van Gogh
#96. We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.
Vincent Van Gogh
#98. 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
#99. 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
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