Van Gogh Paintings Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Learn to trust yourself. That's very vital ... Just stand with yourself. Remember, in his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only two paintings. I personally sold even fewer. — Eric Idle

I think that the mythology of Van Gogh's life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable. — Billy Childish

I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture. — Vincent Van Gogh

I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made.. — Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh was asked how he created such beautiful paintings. He said I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams. — Bob Proctor

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul. — Vincent Van Gogh

When I see how several painters I know here are struggling with their watercolours and paintings so that they can't see a solution anymore, I sometimes think: Friend, the fault is in your drawing. I don't regret for a moment that I did not go in for watercolour and oil painting straight away. I am sure I will catch up if only I struggle on, so that my hand does not waver in drawing and perspective. — Vincent Van Gogh

Is an artist only the one whose paintings are purchased? I think that an artist is a man who always seeks and never finds a final answer.
[Vincent Van Gogh] — Irving Stone

Michael Jordan didn't become a great basketball player because he wanted to do product endorsements. Van Gogh didn't become a great painter because he dreamed that one day his paintings would sell for $50 million. — Jack D. Schwager

What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum. — Vincent Van Gogh

I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases ... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness ... I believe these paintings say what words cannot. — Vincent Van Gogh

'The Night Cafe' and 'The Starry Night' still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself. — Jerry Saltz

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh] — Irving Stone

I once heard some idiot on the radio saying that all great art has suffering as its dominant theme, and that the greatest artists are only able to create because they suffer immensely in their own lives. What a bunch of bullshit. Look at Van Gogh's paintings: there's as much joy in them as there is pain. Suffering is only a single color, and by itself it's boring. — Bart Yates

I lost my job as an art salesman. It was the customer's fault. He wanted to buy the wrong paintings. — Vincent Van Gogh

'Tell me, please,' Van Gogh asked, 'is it justifiable that a person wastes his only life by selling worthless paintings for fools? — Irving Stone

This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the
bourgeoisie.
In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs. — Antonin Artaud

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco. — Irving Stone

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. — Vincent Van Gogh

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis. — Robert Hughes