Vincent van Gogh Quotes

Dutch painter (1853–1890)

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Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Not commercially successful, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, eventually leading to his suicide at age thirty-seven.

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Alternative Names: Vincent Willem van Gogh • van Gogh • Vincent Van Gogh • Van Gogh

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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.

Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.

How I wish we could spend a couple of Christmas days together, for instance — I would also dearly like to have you in my studio once more.

I, too, have been toiling quite hard recently, precisely because I was full of the Christmas feeling, and feeling isn’t enough, one must bring it into one’s work.

So I’m now occupied with two large heads of an orphan man, with his white beard and old-fashioned, old top hat.

This chap has the sort of old, lively face that one would wish for beside a cosy Christmas fire.

That thought, I can’t find the right words, is based not on something negative but on something positive. On the positive awareness that art is something great 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 man’s soul, while much of the proficiency and technical expertise associated with art reminds me of what would be called self-righteousness in religion.

But one doesn't expect out of life what one has already learned that it cannot give, but rather one begins to see more and more clearly that life is only a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not here.

That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter.

It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

I'm such a nobody.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.

Future generations will probably be able to enlighten us on this very interesting subject, and then science itself — with all due respect — may reach conclusions that are more or less in keeping with Christ's sayings about the other half of our life.

If you saw the first painted color-studies that I made when I came here to Nuenen - and the present canvas - side by side - I think you'd see that as far as colour is concerned - things have livened up. I think that the question of the breaking of colours in the relationships of the colours will occupy you too one day. For as an art expert and critic, one must also, it seems to me - be sure of one's ground and have certain convictions. At least for one's own pleasure and to be able to give reasons, and at the same time one must be able to explain it in a few words to others, who sometimes turn to someone like you for enlightenment when they want to know something more about art.

Painting a picture is as difficult as finding a large or a small diamond. Now, however, whereas everybody recognizes the value of a louis d’or or a pure pearl, those who cherish pictures and believe in them are unfortunately rare. But they exist nonetheless.