Vincent van Gogh Quotes

183 Sourced Quotes

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

Vincent van Gogh
That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn't alter the fact that I'm bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!

Vincent van Gogh
But what's your ultimate goal, you'll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.

Vincent van Gogh
The best pictures are always those one dreams of when one is smoking a pipe in bed, but which never get done. But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature.

Vincent van Gogh
Beautiful as you are, shining in your glory.

Vincent van Gogh
But on the road that I'm on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don't study, if I don't keep on trying, then I'm lost, then woe betide me. That's how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that's what's needed.

Vincent van Gogh
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.

Vincent van Gogh
If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.

Vincent van Gogh
Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.

Vincent van Gogh
In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.

Vincent van Gogh
If one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm -- but that's a lie.... That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.

Vincent van Gogh
Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us - a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!

Vincent van Gogh
I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada.

Vincent van Gogh
There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?

Vincent van Gogh
My opinion is that the best thing would be to work on till art lovers feel drawn toward it of their own accord, instead of having to praise or to explain it.

Vincent van Gogh
I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.

Vincent van Gogh
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
No blue without yellow and without orange, and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely.

Vincent van Gogh
Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

Vincent van Gogh
But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will.

Vincent van Gogh
There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!

Vincent van Gogh
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