Vincent van Gogh. Self-Portrait in a Grey Felt Hat.
1887. Oil on card. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
(Click To Enlarge)
|
Vincent van Gogh Quotes
Home
(Click to Enlarge)
Vincent van Gogh. Sower with Setting Sun (After Millet).
June 1888. Oil on canvas.
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, Netherlands.
|
- How wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun.
- I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
- What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
- As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in
fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.
- I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored
than the day.
- If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all
means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
- It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which
one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality
is more important than the feeling for pictures.
- Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever
loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done
in love is done well.
- One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came
to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and
continue on their way.
- When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion.
Then I go out and paint the stars.
- I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
- Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's
soul.
- Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become
the slave of your model.
- An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly
must have a warm heart for his fellow men.
- But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many
things.
- It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes,
than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent.
- Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand
art more and more.
- I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in
the process.
- I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
- In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil,
which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with
my drawing.
- Perhaps it will seem to you that the sunshine is brighter and that
everything has a new charm. At least, I believe this is always the result
of a deep love, and it is a beautiful thing. And I believe people who
think love prevents one from thinking clearly are wrong; for then one
thinks very clearly and is more active than before. And love is something
eternal--the aspect may change, but not the essence. There is the same
difference in a person before and after he is in love as there is in
an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and it
was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real
function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and in that way,
one is more fit for one's work.
- 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.
- I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties.
I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time… the world
concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because
I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I
want to leave some souvenir.
- I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor;
I shall be a painter.
- 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.
- 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.
- How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one
is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.
- What am I in the eyes of most people--a nonentity, an eccentric,
or an unpleasant person--somebody who has no position in society and
will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then--even
if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by
my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That
is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything,
based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often
in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music
inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the
dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an
irresistible momentum.
- By working hard, old man, I hope to make something good one day.
I haven't yet, but I am pursuing it and fighting for it.
- 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 storm? Not everybody has done that
as you and I have; it is a peculiar kind of surroundings and circumstances
that must contribute to such knowledge of nature; it is a peculiar kind
of temperament and character, too, that must help to make it take root.
- 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 gaps, but there is something
in it of what wood or beech or figure has told me, and it is not a tame
or conventional language, that proceeds not from nature itself but from
a studied manner or a system.
- And sometimes there is relief, sometimes there is new inner energy,
and one stands up after it; till at last, someday, one perhaps doesn't
stand up any more, que soit, but that is nothing extraordinary, and
I repeat, in my opinion, such is the common human fate.
- A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little
threads has no time to philosophize about it, rather, he is so absorbed
in his work that he doesn't think, he acts: and it's nothing he can
explain, he just feels how things should go. Even though neither you
nor I would arrive at any definite plans, etc., by talking together
perhaps we could mutually strengthen the feeling that something is ripening
within us. And that is what I should like.
- 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.
- Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a
firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream
which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too;
at all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found
his work that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. I mean, I
may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy
days in my life, but I shouldn't like to be counted among the unfortunate,
nor would it be correct if I were.
- Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side
of it is that it gives energy.
- That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But
am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such- be
it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and
if others did not live, and then, if we live, there is something mysterious
in that. Now call that God, or human nature or whatever you like, but
there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is
very much alive and very real, and see, that is God, or as good as God.
To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead
one, or a stuffed one, but a living one, who with irresistible force
urges us toward 'aimer encore'; that is my opinion.
- 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.
- What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance,
so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.
- I want to do drawings which touch people...In figure or landscape
I should wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.
- 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. Sometimes it is
well to go into the world and converse with people, and at times one
is obliged to do so, but he who would prefer to be quietly alone with
his work, and who wants but very few friends, will go safest through
the world and among people. And even in the most refined circles and
with the best surroundings and circumstances, one must keep something
of the original character of an anchorite, for other wise one has no
root in oneself; one must never let the fire go out in one's soul, but
keep it burning. And whoever chooses poverty for himself and loves it
possesses a great treasure, and will always clearly hear the voice of
his conscience; he who hears and obeys that voice, which is the best
gift of God, finds at least a friend in it, and is never alone.
- Our greatest glory consists not in never failing, but in rising every
time we fall.
- Conscience is a man's compass.
- 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.
- I know for sure that I have an instinct for colour, and that it will
come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my
bones.
- You do not know how paralysing that staring of a blank canvas is;
it says to the painter, You can't do anything ... Many painters are
afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the really
passionate painter who is daring -- and who has once and for all broken
that spell of 'you cannot'.
- In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
- Art is something which, although produced by human hands, is not
created by these hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper
source in our souls.
- There certainly is an affinity between a person and his work, but
it is not easy to define what this affinity is, and on that question
many judge quite wrongly.
- In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention
to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.
- When all the colors in a composition are strengthened, there results a kind
of quiet and harmony. Something happens in nature that is similar to the music
of Wagner, which even though it is performed by an orchestra, is still intimate.
- I believe it is one's duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of
nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love.
- The wheat field has ...poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen.
- We can only make our pictures speak.
- I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse...I am
painting big sunflowers.
- It often seems to me that the night is even more vibrantly colored than the day.
- The cypresses are always in my thoughts.
- 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.
- I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.
- I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none
of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters
suffer but do not profit.
Home
|
|
