Vincent van Gogh Quotes

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

Vincent van Gogh
But by fighting the difficulties in which one finds oneself, an inner strength develops from within our heart, which improves in life's fight.

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

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
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
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
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 a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.

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
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
Study, analyse the social structure - that's always far more effective than moralising.

Vincent van Gogh
When I have a model who is quiet and steady and with whom I am acquainted, then I draw repeatedly 'til there is one drawing that is different from the rest, which does not look like an ordinary study, but more typical and with more feeling.

Vincent van Gogh
It astonishes me already when I compare my condition today with what it was a month ago. Before that I knew well enough one could fracture one's legs and arms and recover afterward, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too...

Vincent van Gogh
I believe that one thinks much more soundly if the thoughts arise from direct contact with things, than if one looks at things with the aim of finding this or that in them.

Vincent van Gogh
It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.

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
If I were to think of and dwell on disastrous possibilities, I could do nothing. I throw myself headlong into my work, and come up again with my studies.

Vincent van Gogh