Vincent van Gogh Quotes

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Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.

Vincent van Gogh
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
If you work diligently... without saying to yourself beforehand, 'I want to make this or that,' if you work as though you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupation, you will not always find you do well. But the days you least expect it, you will find a subject which holds its own with the work of those who have gone before.

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
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