Paul Gauguin Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.

Paul Gauguin
All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.

Paul Gauguin
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!

Paul Gauguin
The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

Paul Gauguin
One's state of mind is three-quarters of what counts, so it has to be carefully nurtured if you want to do something great and lasting.

Paul Gauguin
The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain.

Paul Gauguin
I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.

Paul Gauguin
Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.

Paul Gauguin
Slyly, banteringly, but also overbearingly, the critic - the one who does not swallow anything whole, who waits until posterity has consecrated it before... howling - is among those who howl their admiration the way they howl their insults: don't be afraid, don't tremble - the beast doesn't have any nails or teeth, or even brain: it is stuffed...

Paul Gauguin
Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool...

Paul Gauguin
Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.

Paul Gauguin
Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows...

Paul Gauguin
Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second... You see the sequence.

Paul Gauguin
I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.

Paul Gauguin
Why did I hesitate to put all this glory of the sun on my canvas?

Paul Gauguin
Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised.

Paul Gauguin
Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.

Paul Gauguin
Without delay I began work, without hesitation and all of a fever.

Paul Gauguin
If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I'd rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!

Paul Gauguin
Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow...

Paul Gauguin
It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.

Paul Gauguin
Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.

Paul Gauguin
However depressed I may be I am not in the habit of giving up a project without having tried everything, even the 'impossible', to gain my end.

Paul Gauguin
It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.

Paul Gauguin
My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.

Paul Gauguin
How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.

Paul Gauguin
I was so bent on putting all my energy in its ['Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going'] before dying [suffering from syphilis, Gauguin decided to commit suicide at the end], such painful passion amid terrible circumstances, and such a clear vision without corrections that the hastiness of it disappears and life bursts from it. It does not stink of models, professionalism, and the so-called rules that I have always disregarded.

Paul Gauguin
Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

Paul Gauguin
At an exhibition in London, one sagacious critic wrote: 'Monsieur Degas seems a good pupil of Nittis!' Doesn't this reflect that mania which men of letters have for squabbling in court over who had a given idea first? And the mania spreads to painters who take great care of their originality.

Paul Gauguin
Colour! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

Paul Gauguin