I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.

To die for the sake of dying - I prefer to die of passion than to die of boredom!

But I must work on in full calmness and serenity... The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it, because I have walked on the earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express a sincere human feeling. So this work is the aim-and through concentration upon that one idea, everything one does is simplified. Now the work goes slowly-a reason the more to lose no time.

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!!!

The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.

To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, who with irresistible force urges us towards more loving.