Vincent van Gogh Quotes

Dutch painter (1853–1890)

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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What color is in a picture, enthusiasm is in life.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

We spent our whole lives in unconsous excercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words

The more you love, the more you suffer

There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even — the French air clears up the brain and does good — a world of good.

I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may.
But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.

So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one’s soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke coming from the top of the chimney, and go on their way.

I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away

It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation — of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things — the thought of God comes into one's mind.

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

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.

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.