Paul Gauguin Quotes

All the joys — animal and human — of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature.

Je cherche le caractère dans chaque matière. Or le caractère de la céramique de gris est le sentiment du grand feu, et cette figure [sculpture] calcinée dans cet enfer, en exprime je crois assez fortement le caractère.

I look for the character of each medium. The character of stoneware is that of a very hot fire, and this figure [sculpture] that has been scorched in the ovens of hell is I think a strong expression of this character.

The self-esteem one acquires and a well-earned feeling of one's strength are the only consolation in this world. Income, after all, most brutes have that.

No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways. …
It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of the common task.

I am a child. I'm an independent. They can not mock me for two things they are not. They blame me, especially your family. They do not know what is in the artist's nature. Let me live like this for some time. I continue along my path. I have a goal. I will prove to you that I am right. I am a great artist, I know that. That's why I endure so much suffering to follow my calling. Otherwise I would feel like a villain. There will come a day when our children can face anyone... with their father's name to protect and honor.

Neuznávám žádnou jinou pravdu, kromě pravdy umělecké lži.

How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.

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

At the age of ten, twenty, a hundred, very young, a little older, and very old, an artist is always an artist. Isn't he better at some times, some moments, than at others? Never impeccable, since he is a living, human being?

The cyclone ends. The sun returns; the lofty coconut trees lift up their plumes again; man does likewise. The great anguish is over; joy has returned; the sea smiles like a child.

Your Nordic blue eyes looked attentively at the paintings hanging on the walls. I felt stirrings of rebellion: a whole clash between your civilization and my barbarism. Civilization from which you suffer. Barbarism which for me is a rejuvenation.

A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.

"Where do we come from?" "What are we?""Where are we going?"

Para ver cierro los ojos