Vincent van Gogh Quotes (1853-1890)

“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.”

“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?”

“I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.”

“I have drawn into myself so much that I literally do not see any other people anymore-- excepting the peasants with whom I have direct contact, since I paint them.”

“Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith.”

“Here's a short note for Bernard and Lautrec, to whom I'd solemnly promised to write.1 I'm sending it to you [Theo van Gogh, in Paris] so that you can give it to them sometime, it's not in the least urgent and it will be a reason for you to see what they're doing and to hear what they're saying, if you want.”

“Have you read anything beautiful lately? Do make sure somehow to get hold of and read the books by Eliot, you won't be sorry, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Romola (Savonarola’s story), Scenes of clerical life. You know we gave the 3 underlined ones to Pa on his birthday last year. When I get the time for reading, I'll read them again.”

“Though I have some objections to Uhde, I admit that I certainly admire the main part of this picture, which forms three-quarters of it — the children.”

“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.”

“Your description of Troyon and Rousseau, for instance, is lively enough to give me some idea of which of their manners they are done in. There were other paintings from the time of Troyon's municipal pasture that had a certain 'mood' that one would have to call 'dramatic', even though they aren't figure paintings.”

“I am reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. A book which I remember of old, but I had a great longing to read it again. It is very beautiful, that figure of Monseigneur Myriel or Bienvenu I think sublime....It is good to read such a book again, I think, just to keep some feelings allive. Especially love for humanity, and the faith in, and consciousness of, something higher, in short, quelque chose là-huat.”

“Gauguin interests me very much as a man — very much. For a long time now it has seemed to me that in our nasty profession of painting we are most sorely in need of men with the hands and the stomachs of workmen. More natural tastes — more loving and more charitable temperaments — than the decadent dandies of the Parisian boulevards have. Well, here we are without the slightest doubt in the presence of a virgin creature with savage instincts. With Gauguin blood and sex prevail over ambition.”

“My dear Theo.. ..Yesterday I saw the Corot exhibition. It included a painting of the 'Mount of Olives'; I'm glad he painted that. On the right, a group of olive trees, dark against the darkening blue sky; in the background hills covered with shrubs and a couple of tall trees, above them the evening star. There are 3 Corot's at the Salon [in Paris], very beautiful, the most beautiful one, painted shortly before his death, 'Women cutting wood', will probably appear as a woodcut in 'L'Illustration or Le Monde Illustré'.”

“First and foremost, the masterly etching, 'The Bush', by Daubigny/Ruisdael. [= Daubigny's etching 'The bush', he made after Jacob van Ruisdael ].. ..I plan to do two drawings, either in sepia or something else, one of them after this etching [by Daubigny] — the other [etching, made] after T. Rousseau's 'The oven in Les Landes'. This latter sepia is already done — it's true — but if you compare it with Daubigny's etching, you'll understand that it becomes weak, even though the sepia drawing considered on its own may very well have a certain tone and sentiment. I have to go back to it and work on it again.. ..I couldn't tell you how happy I feel to have taken up drawing again. It had already been on my mind for a long time, but I always saw the thing as impossible and beyond my reach.”

“Van Gogh, whose work was exhibited in Dresden in 1905, just as the group Die Brücke was founded, was a major influence in his patchy brushstroke and bold color choices. Fritz Bleyl responded that it [the Van Gogh exhibition] was 'a big, impressive surprise.' The group became so influenced by van Gogh by 1907, that Nolde suggested changing the group's name to 'Van Goghiana'. Heckel's art teacher de:Fritz Schumacher in 1905 blamed their uncharacteristic approach to art on: 'the influence of a van Gogh exhibit, which could be seen at this time in Dresden. '”

“Nevertheless, in the case of Vincent van Gogh, in my opinion, despite the sometimes misleading strangeness of his works, it is difficult for an unprejudiced and knowledgeable viewer to deny or question the naive truthfulness of his art, the ingeniousness of his vision.. .Indeed, independent of this indefinable aroma of good faith and of the truly seen that all his paintings exude, the choice of subjects, the constant harmony between the most excessive colour notes, the conscientious study of character, the continual search for the essential sign of each thing, a thousand significant details undeniably assert his profound and almost childlike sincerity, his great love for nature and for truth - his own personal truth.”

“In the spring of 1845, William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, began observing with his great six-foot telescope... The Earl was excited by what he was the first human to see: spiral patterns of stars, seemingly swirling in great 'spiral convolutions' about the centre of the galaxy. ... No one could ever have seen the spiral pattern of stars in a galaxy unless they had looked through Rosse's telescope or seen his drawings.. .I believe that Van Gogh would have seen those drawings in the press following the publicity attracted by them, or in Flammarion's book ... and gained his astronomical inspiration from them.”

“Vincent.. ..painted Montmartre [c. 1887], its little scraggy gardens; the 'Moulin de la Galette', its open-air roadhouses; his excursions took him as far afield as Asnières. He became a guest at the 'Ile de la Grande-Jatte', which Seurat had already made famous with his schematic studies. Vincent would start out with a large canvas mounted on his back, then divide it up in as many sections as demanded by the motifs he found. In the evening he brought it home filled, and it was like a little portable museum, wherein were culled all the emotions of the day. There were bits of the Seine filled with boats, houses with the blue 'balancoires'; smart bustling restaurants with multicolored blinds, with oleander; corners of abandoned parks or of properties up for sale. A vernal poetry emanated from these fragments seized by the tip of his brush as if stolen from the fleeting hours. I savored their charm all the more because at that time I lived in those places, because they were the objects of my solitary walks, and because they were rendered with the soul that I felt in them.”

“..he [= Vincent] often stayed talking for a while after the lesson [Greek and Latin, in Amsterdam, 1877-78], and naturally we often discussed his former profession, the art dealing business [of Goupil & Cie.] He had kept quite a number of the prints which he had collected in those days [1869-1875], little lithographs after paintings, etc. He brought them to show me repeatedly, but they were always completely spoiled; the white borders were literally covered with quotations from Thomas a Kempis and the Bible, more or less connected with the subject, which he had scrawled all over them.. ..in no way could I guess those days.. ..that in the depths of his soul lay dormant the future visionary of colour.”

“What fascinates me about Van Gogh is that his sun dries up everything. Maybe he was melodramatic but my point really is.. ..if you are a painter you have to face that self-consciousness. You get dirty and pathetic; very miserable. It makes me self-conscious to talk about it. There is something corrupt on art. Nothing do with any 'ism' but a thing in nature loses its innocence and becomes a grotesque thing.. [in conversation with W.C. Seitz, 1959]”

“In my yellow room, sunflowers with purple eyes stand out against a yellow background; the ends of their stalks bathe in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In one corner of the painting, the painter's signature: Vincent. And the yellow sun, coming through the yellow curtains of my room, floods all this flowering with gold, and in the morning, when I wake up in my bed, I have the impression that it all smells very good. Oh yes! he loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth. When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion? He, taking his yellowest brush, wrote on the suddenly purple wall: I am of sound mind, I am the Holy Ghost.”

“One day in the drawing class of the Academy of Antwerp [End of 1885 / beginning of 1886], the students were given, as if by chance, a cast of the Venus de Milo to copy. Van Gogh, struck by one of the essential characteristics of the model, strongly accentuated the width of her hips.. .The beautiful Greek goddess had become a robust Flemish matron. When the honest [art-teacher] M. Sieber saw this he tore Van Gogh's sheet of paper with the furious strokes of his crayon, correcting his drawing while reminding him of the immutable canons of art. ..[Van Gogh] flew into a violent rage and shouted at the horrified professor: "You clearly don't know what a young woman is like, God damn it! A woman must have hips, buttocks, a pelvis in which she can carry a baby!" This was the last lesson that Van Gogh took - or gave - at the Academy of Antwerp.”

“..he [Vincent van Gogh] is closer to me than [Ferdinand] Hodler, for he sees colors as I see them. On reading [Van Gogh's letters] I have again and again said, Good Lord, that is just how you would make a poem.. .The difference is that painting is very difficult, whereas writing poetry is terribly easy provided one has eyes to see it.”

“..It is not a question of trying to reproduce objective features, only of good practice for the fingers and for the perceptive faculty, and that too is very useful. You must have read how Van Gogh was always getting his brother to send him drawings to copy.. ..to get 'du corps'. So one should be always drawing...”

“Certainly, I am not insensitive to the researches on light by M. Georges Seurat.. .I am attracted to M. Denis's small compositions, of so soft a tone, enveloped in such tender mysticism. I recognize, in M. Armand Guillaumin's limited and unimaginative Realism a fine touch.. .And despite the blacks with which he unduly soils his figures, M. de Toulouse-Lautrec shows a real power, spiritual and tragic.. .M. Lucien Pissarro's engravings have verve, sobriety, and distinction.. .But none of these uncontestable artists.. ..captivate me as much as Vincent van Gogh. In his case I sense that I am in the presence of someone higher, more masterful, someone who disturbs me, moves me, and compels recognition. It is perhaps not yet the time to tell the story of Vincent van Gogh as it ought to be told. His death is too recent, and it was too tragic. The memories I would evoke would revive the grief, which still brings tears.”