Paul Gauguin Quotes

With this painting, I tried to make everything breathe faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style and great nature with its scream.

Don't over finish your work. There is value to done.

D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.

It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of a common task.

Comment voyez-vous cet arbre? Il est bien vert? Mettez donc du vert, le plus beau vert de votre palette; — et cette ombre, plutôt bleue? Ne craignez pas la peindre aussi bleue que possible.

A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.

Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.

D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous

I want only silence, silence and again silence. Let me die quite and forgotten, or if I must live, let me live more quite, and forgotten still...

To a man who has not succeeded we say 'You made a mistake'.
To a man who ha lost at the lottery, 'You had bad luck'.

My Dear Mr. Pissarro; - I accept with pleasure the invitation that you and Mr. Degas were kind enough to extend to me. And naturally in that case I shall abide by all the rules that govern your Societe. Based on this decision, I also have the membership dues available. I will probably see you at Miss Latouche's and we will talk about this.

Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.

My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.