Gogh Quotes & Sayings

Herman Melville was supposed to be an accountant. Van Gogh was meant to be an art dealer. I was meant to take the train into New York and work for a bank. To be an artist, you have to say goodbye to your family. — Don McLean

I will not live without love. — Vincent Van Gogh

I tried to express through red and green the terrible passions of humanity. — Vincent Van Gogh

Well, I dare not allow myself any illusions, and I am afraid it may never happen that Father and Mother will really appreciate my art. It is not their fault; we do not see the same things with the same eyes, or have the same thoughts raised in us by them. They will never be able to understand what painting is. — Vincent Van Gogh

If your inner voice is telling you that you can't paint, by all means, hurry up and paint and silence the voice. — Vincent Van Gogh

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane. — Kevin Hearne

Here I sit with my three old cats, getting closer to eternity all the time, on a twine chair - (Van Gogh) and me too - and it gets very depressing. What can I do? I had high hopes. We all did. Remember just outside the Tangier Consulate: "Have you met the Skipper yet?" Later I did. And now no skipping, no transport anywhere, except to a cut-rate mortuary. Where were you when I wasn't there? "Hound of Hell!!" screamed the Pop Star, and kicked the fink dog in the nuts. "Only decent thing I done." "Forget the whole thing. I have." Great gasp at this point. How much time? have I left? Not much it seems. — William S. Burroughs

We followed him through the wealthy splendor of the house. Hardwood floors. Custom carved woodworking. Statues. Fountains. Suits of armor. Original painting, one of them a van Gogh. Stained-glass windows. Household staff in formal uniform. I kept expecting to come across a flock of peacocks roaming the halls, or maybe a pet cheetah in a diamond-studded collar. — Jim Butcher

At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky. — Vincent Van Gogh

I am always in the hope to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors - colors which marry each other ... complement each other as a man and a woman do. — Vincent Van Gogh

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals. — Vincent Van Gogh

There is safety in the very heart of danger. — Vincent Van Gogh

What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came. — Vincent Van Gogh

As you can see, I am immersing myself in color-I've held back from that until now; and I don't regret it. — Vincent Van Gogh

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it. — Vincent Van Gogh

Sometimes, dear brother, I know so well what I want. I am quite able to do without God, both in my life and in my painting, but what I cannot do without, unwell as I am, is something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create. — Vincent Van Gogh

That night I wrote in my journal: Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone
was it van Gogh?
said that orange is the color of insanity. _Beauty is terror._ We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us. — Donna Tartt

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream. — Vincent Van Gogh

We take death to reach a star — Vincent Van Gogh

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. — Vincent Van Gogh

How right it is to love flowers and the greenery of pines and ivy and hawthorn hedges; they have been with us from the very beginning. — Vincent Van Gogh

Well, what shall I say; our inward thoughts, do they ever show outwardly? There may be a great fire in our soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a little bit of smoke coming through the chimney, and pass on their way. — Vincent Van Gogh

So let us go forward quietly, each on his own path, forever making for the light. — Vincent Van Gogh

If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may. — Vincent Van Gogh

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day. — Vincent Van Gogh

I am a traveler," he wrote, "going somewhere and to some destination...only the somewhere and the destination do not exist — Steven Naifeh

That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it. — Joni Mitchell

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else. — Vincent Van Gogh

I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter ... — Vincent Van Gogh

I am always doing what I can't do so I may learn how to do it. — Vincent Van Gogh

What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to
paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn't matter; painting was the
stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies
in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew
to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been
worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if
he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in
Amsterdam. (Mendes Da Costa — Irving Stone

Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis. — Vincent Van Gogh

Do go on doing a lot of walking and keep up your love of nature, for that is the right way to understand art better and better. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see. And there are painters who never do anything that is no good... — Vincent Van Gogh

Layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads — Chad Harbach

As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely. — 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

Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me. — Vincent Van Gogh

Daemonic compulsiveness can kill as easily as it can save.
The true novelist must be at once driven and indifferent. Van
Gogh never sold a painting in his life. Poe came close with
poetry and fiction, selling very little. Drivenness only helps if
it forces the writer not to suicide but to the making of splendid
works of art, allowing him indifference to whether or not the
novel sells, whether or not it's appreciated. Drivenness is trouble
for both the novelist and his friends; but no novelist, I
think, can succeed without it. Along with the peasant in the
novelist, there must be a man with a whip. — John Gardner

We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: "He is the one." But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road. — Vincent Van Gogh

Great things do not just happen by impulse,
but as a succession of small things linked together. — Vincent Van Gogh

Life is not long for anybody, and the problem is only to make something of it. — Vincent Van Gogh

To understand blue you must first understand yellow and orange — Vincent Van Gogh

Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained. — Vincent Van Gogh

How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth. — Vincent Van Gogh

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour. — Vincent Van Gogh

I myself believe that there is in every painter's life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past. — Vincent Van Gogh

For the great doesn't happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together. — Vincent Van Gogh

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. — Vincent Van Gogh

I once gave a girl a bloody fake ear in a Tiffany jewelry box with a letter that said, will you Gogh to prom with me? — Matthew Gray Gubler

There are idlers and idlers, who form a contrast. — Vincent Van Gogh

Do you know that drawing with words is also an art ... ? — Vincent Van Gogh

There are often beams in our eye that we know not of. Let us therefore ask that our eye may become single, for then we ourselves shall become wholly single. — Vincent Van Gogh

Every man must bear his own burden. — Vincent Van Gogh

It's not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures. — Vincent Van Gogh

You can feel the stars and the infinity of the sky since life, in spite of everything, is like a dream. — Vincent Van Gogh

Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough. — Vincent Van Gogh

I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening ... like a light in the midst of the darkness. — Vincent Van Gogh

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes. — J.G. Ballard

No, originally I thought that writing articles would keep me from having to see a psychiatrist, but I became even more depressed as a result. — Theo Van Gogh

If Delacroix discovered painting when he had neither teeth nor health, I can discover it when I have neither teeth nor the mind.
[Vincent Van Gogh] — Irving Stone

In general, you have great artists who have died far too early and who have left great cultural impact. If you look at people like Vincent van Gogh or Jean-Michel Basquiat-there's a long, long list of artists who have died in tragic circumstances, and far, far too early. — Simon De Pury

I always feel that I am a traveler, going somewhere and to some destination.
If I tell myself that the somewhere and the destination do not exist, that seems to me very likely and reasonable enough.
The brothel keeper, when he kicks anyone out, has similar logic, argues it well, and is always right, I know. So at the end of the course I shall find my mistake. Be it so. I shall find then that not only the Arts, but everything else as well, were only dreams, that one's self was nothing at all. — Vincent Van Gogh

I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh. — Billy Childish

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

It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one's youth. — Vincent Van Gogh

If you work diligently ... without saying to yourself beforehand, 'I want to make this or that,' if you work as though you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupation, you will not always find you do well. But the days you least expect it, you will find a subject which holds its own with the work of those who have gone before. — Vincent Van Gogh

Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life. — Vincent Van Gogh

It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work ... and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after. — Vincent Van Gogh

But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will. — Vincent Van Gogh

I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process. — Vincent Van Gogh

It quite often makes me feel sad that painting's like a bad mistress one might have, who's always spending, spending and it's never enough.. [Letter 630, Arles, 23 June 1888] — Vincent Van Gogh

If one keeps loving faithfully what is really worth loving, and does not waste one's love on insignificant and unworthy and meaningless things, one will get more light by and by and grow stronger. — Vincent Van Gogh

Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for diner or coffee. And it has been like that form the beginning. — Vincent Van Gogh

Watercolor is not my way of expression.
[Vincent Van Gogh] — Irving Stone

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. — Vincent Van Gogh

I feel close to Marvin Gaye, Vincent van Gogh, because nobody appreciated his work until he was dead. Now it's worth millions. — Tupac Shakur

The great artist is the simplifier. — Vincent Van Gogh

I myself am quite absorbed by the delicate yellow, delicate soft green, delicate violet of a ploughed and weeded piece of soil. — Vincent Van Gogh

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with. — Vincent Van Gogh

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone. — Vincent Van Gogh

Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. — Vincent Van Gogh

I want to warn against the Fifth Column which is trying to hinder our free way of life in Holland. — Theo Van Gogh

The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting. — Vincent Van Gogh

I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw. — Irving Stone

Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person's life. The country music field has especially been hit hard by this. All my songs have been written by people who went out of fashion years ago. Just like da Vinci and Renoir and van Gogh. Nobody paints like that anymore. But it can't be wrong to try. — Bob Dylan

The fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry exist specifically to help the emotionally unstable become more stable and lead happier, healthier lives. Unlike in the eras of Vincent Van Gogh and Abraham Lincoln, there is now professional help available for those who suffer from emotional illness. Treatment may require therapy or even medication, but hope is now available every single day in practically every city in the civilized world. — David J. Lieberman

One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music. — Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It's the same with me and writing. — Wayne Dyer

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

At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and 'little seedlings' start to awake. So if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out, too. More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day. — Michael Leunig

What I need is courage, and this often fails me. And it is also a fact that since my disease, when I am in the fields I am overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness to such a horrible extent that I shy away from going out. But this will change all the same as time goes on. Only when I stand a painting before my easel do I feel somewhat alive. Never mind, this is going to change too, for now my health is so good that I suppose the physical part of me will gain the victory. — Vincent Van Gogh

For loneliness, worries, difficulties, the unsatisfied need for kindness and sympathy - that is what is hard to bear ... — 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

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

Art is but imitation of nature. — Vincent Van Gogh

There is no blue without yellow and without orange. — Vincent Van Gogh

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 ... — Vincent Van Gogh

I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed. — Vincent Van Gogh

Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all. — Vincent Van Gogh