Vincent van Gogh Quotes

Dutch painter (1853–1890)

Add quote

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.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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

From Wikidata (CC0)

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

One must seize the reality of one’s fate and that’s that.

There is nothing more beautiful than nature early in the morning.

The way to know life is to love many things.

There are two ways of reasoning about painting: how to do it and how not to do it; how to d it with great deal of drawing and not much colour, how not to do it with a great deal of colour and not much drawing.

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.

You can feel the stars and the infinity of the sky. Since life, in spite of everything, is like a fairytale.

Where friendship blooms, life is reborn.

So don’t study and swot too much, for that makes one sterile. Enjoy yourself too much rather than too little, and don’t take art or love too seriously- there is very little one can do about it

It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in our lives immediately wrench us out of our musings, and our own adventures throw us back irrevocably upon our personal feelings — joy, boredom, suffering, anger, or a smile.

One begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order to be true to nature, and one concludes by working quietly from one's own palette alone, and then nature is the result.

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes
one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it.

You can live to be old or young, but you'll always have moments when you lose your head.

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 in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after. A work that is good may not last forever, but the thought expressed by it will, and the work itself will surely survive for a very long time, and those who come later can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and copy their example.

I knew well enough that one could fracture one’s legs and arms and recover afterward, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too.