Paul Gauguin Quotes

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.

Oh yes! he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland - those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.

Civilization is what makes you sick.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

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.

Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.

I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

I shut my eyes in order to see.

One's state of mind is three-quarters of what counts, so it has to be carefully nurtured if you want to do something great and lasting.

I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.

Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.

Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.

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.

Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.

The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.

Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.