Vincent Van Gogh Quotes

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

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.

...to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Art is to console those who are broken by life.

In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.

I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.

There are colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other like man and woman.

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

Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance...I'm going like a painting-locomotive.

What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is ... for us humans.

I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.

I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

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.

But for one's health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.

If one were to say but few words, though ones with meaning, one would do better than to say many that were only empty sounds, and just as easy to utter as they were of little use.

The more ugly, old, nasty, ill, and poor I become the more I want to get my own back by producing vibrant, well-arranged, radiant colour.

There is nothing more beautiful than nature early in the morning.

I was certainly going the right way for a stroke when I left Paris. I paid for it nicely afterwards! When I stopped drinking, when I stopped smoking so much, when I began to think again instead of trying not to think - Good Lord, the depression and the prostration of it! Work in these magnificent natural surroundings (Arles) has restored my morale, but even now some efforts are too much for me: my strength fails me.

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.

Love is something eternal.

It is a sad and very melancholy scene, which must strike everyone who knows and feels that we also have to pass one day through the valley of the shadow of death, and “que la fin de la vie humaine, ce sont des larmes ou des cheveux blancs.” What lies beyond this is a great mystery that only God knows, but He has revealed absolutely through His word that there is a resurrection of the dead.

Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man's soul.

For me work is an absolute necessity, indeed I can't really drag it out, I take no more pleasure in anything than in work, that's to say, pleasure in other things stops immediately and I become melancholy if I can't get on with the work.

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

And love makes one calmer about many things, and in that way, one is more fit for one's work.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Don't lose heart if it's very difficult at times, everything will come out all right and nobody can in the beginning do as he wishes.

The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.

If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.

I felt my energy return and that I said to myself, in any event I'll recover from it, I'll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I'll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me.

Yellow is capable of charming God.

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.

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.

Spring is the fresh green of young corn and the pink blush of blossoms. Autumn contrasts the yellowed foilage with violet hues. Winter is the white of snow against its black forms ... Summer is the contrast of blues and the golden bronze of the corn.

The worse I get along with people the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

Van Gogh was so under appreciated in his time, he sold only one of his 900 paintings while alive. Posthumously, he became one of the most famous artists of all time and his work is now considered priceless. Oh the irony.

Doing little things well is a step toward doing big things better.

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!

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me.

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.

I would like to leave this world and never return. I severed my ear, but how I wish that I had severed my heart. I shall never amount to anything.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.

Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.