Paul Gauguin Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

Paul Gauguin
In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.

Paul Gauguin
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Paul Gauguin
But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.

Paul Gauguin
I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.

Paul Gauguin
.. color being enigmatic in itself.... then to be logical we cannot use it any other way than enigmatically,..

Paul Gauguin
In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

Paul Gauguin
In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?

Paul Gauguin
Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor - rather, to love him.

Paul Gauguin
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

Paul Gauguin
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Paul Gauguin
The critic asks me: 'So you are a Symbolist? I mean well and I would like to learn; why don't you explain Symbolism to me'.. I answer...'Well, my paintings probably speak Hebrew, which you do not understand, so there is no point in continuing the conversation.

Paul Gauguin
With what is he concerned? Drawing was at its lowest ebb; it had to be restored. Looking at these nudes, I exclaim, 'Drawing has come back again!'
As a man and painter he sets an example. 'Degas' is one of those rare masters who could have had anything he wanted, yet he scorned decorations, honors, fortune, without bitterness, without jealousy.

Paul Gauguin
I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.

Paul Gauguin