Vincent van Gogh Quotes

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I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.

Vincent van Gogh
In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart

Vincent van Gogh
I hope I shall be able to make some drawings in which there is something human.

Vincent van Gogh
It was Richepin who said somewhere, 'The love of art means loss of real love'... True, but on the other hand, real love makes you disgusted with art.

Vincent van Gogh
I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours.

Vincent van Gogh
You can feel the stars and the infinity of the sky since life, in spite of everything, is like a dream.

Vincent van Gogh
Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.

Vincent van Gogh
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
Whoever lives sincerely and encounters much trouble and disappointment without being bowed down is worth more than one who has always sailed before the wind and has only known prosperity.

Vincent van Gogh
As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.

Vincent van Gogh
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
For loneliness, worries, difficulties, the unsatisfied need for kindness and sympathy - that is what is hard to bear...

Vincent van Gogh
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
A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn't think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it.

Vincent van Gogh
Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.

Vincent van Gogh
There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you? Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities.

Vincent van Gogh
We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder.

Vincent van Gogh
Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me.

Vincent van Gogh
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
I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.

Vincent van Gogh
It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.

Vincent van Gogh
To stick to the present and not let it pass without drawing some profit from it, that's what I think duty is....let us perservere as far as we can rather today than tomorrow.

Vincent van Gogh
You know, what makes the prison disappear is every deep, serious attachment. To be friends, to be brothers, to love; that opens the prison through sovereign power, through a most powerful spell. But he who doesn't have that remains in death. But where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again.

Vincent van Gogh
I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject; but still I don't invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find it already there. It's a question of picking out what one wants from nature.

Vincent van Gogh
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
Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and continuous observations. By persistent, I mean not only continuous work, but also not giving up your opinion at the bidding of such and such a person.

Vincent van Gogh
What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man... I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.

Vincent van Gogh
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
Life is not long for anybody, and the problem is only to make something of it.

Vincent van Gogh
Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.

Vincent van Gogh