If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

To paint nature you must be in it a long time.

Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.

Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

In trees, I see expression and soul

I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit.

One can never study nature too much and too hard