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Vincent van Gogh Quotes
1853–1890 Netherlands
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.
Also known as: Gogh, Vincent Willem Van, Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Vincent, Vincent Van Gogh
Random Vincent van Gogh quote
73 quotes
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
To some, woman is heresy and diabolical. To me she is just the opposite.
Letter to Theo (1884)
Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason!
Letter to Theo (1880)
I am busy painting every day studies of the weavers here, which I think are technically better than the painted studies from Drenthe, which I sent you.
It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once.
I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low.
When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
All my work is in a way founded on Japanese art.. .Japanese art, in decadence in its own country, takes root again among the French impressionist artists.
I've experienced this in these crises to such a point that all the people I see then seem to me, even if I recognize them – which isn't always the case – to come from very far away and to be entirely different from what they are in reality..
There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you? Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities.
Some good must come by clinging to the right. Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.
The sadness will last forever.
Of course I should be very happy to sell a drawing but I am happier still when a real artist like Weissenbruch says about an unsalable??? study or drawing: "That is true to nature, I could work from that myself."
I am not working for myself alone, I believe in the absolute necessity for a new art of color, of design, and - of the artistic life..
When I am writing I instinctively make a little drawing now and then like the one I sent you lately, and for instance, this morning, Elijah in the Desert.
..Here I am shut up for the livelong day under lock and key and with keepers in a cell.. ..I will not deny that I would rather have died than have caused and suffered such trouble.
I am sure you will like it, it is such a fine business [art-dealer].. ..I am so glad that we shall both be in the same profession [art dealing] and in the same firm [Goupil and Co.]
For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream in the same simple way as I dream about the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.
.I have done well to come here [to the hospital of Saint-Remy,] first of all that by seeing the actual truth about the life of the various madmen and lunatics in this menagerie I am losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing.
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