Top 120 Paul Gauguin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer.”

— Paul Gauguin

52. “What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?”

— Paul Gauguin

53. “It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.”

— Paul Gauguin

54. “My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.”

— Paul Gauguin

55. “You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author’s mind.”

— Paul Gauguin

56. “One’s state of mind is three-quarters of what counts, so it has to be carefully nurtured if you want to do something great and lasting.”

— Paul Gauguin

57. “I’d like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.”

— Paul Gauguin

58. “Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? – photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won’t be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!”

— Paul Gauguin

59. “If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I’d rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!”

— Paul Gauguin

60. “Beautiful colors exist, though we do not realize it, and are glimpsed behind the veil that modesty has drawn over them.”

— Paul Gauguin

61. “Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised.”

— Paul Gauguin

62. “With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.”

— Paul Gauguin

63. “Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.”

— Paul Gauguin

64. “In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn’t the revolutionary’s work become official, once the State takes it over?”

— Paul Gauguin

65. “A hint – don’t paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God – to create like our Divine Master.”

— Paul Gauguin

66. “Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.”

— Paul Gauguin

67. “Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.”

— Paul Gauguin

68. “I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.”

— Paul Gauguin

69. “No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways. It would be needless to point this out if the unscrupulous were not always saying the opposite. It’s so small a thing, the life of man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of the common task. I wish to love, and I cannot. I wish not to love, and I cannot.”

— Paul Gauguin

70. “There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.”

— Paul Gauguin

71. “Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool...”

— Paul Gauguin

72. “I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.”

— Paul Gauguin

73. “I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.”

— Paul Gauguin

74. “The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.”

— Paul Gauguin

75. “A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.”

— Paul Gauguin

76. “Concentrate your strengths against your competitor’s relative weaknesses.”

— Paul Gauguin

77. “Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.”

— Paul Gauguin

78. “The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”

— Paul Gauguin

79. “Perhaps I have no talent, but all vanity aside – I do not believe that anyone makes an artistic attempt, no matter how small, without having a little – or there are many fools.”

— Paul Gauguin

80. “Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature’s means.”

— Paul Gauguin

81. “All the joys – animal and human – of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.”

— Paul Gauguin

82. “Brave as you may be, wise even as you may be, you tremble when the earth trembles. That is a sensation common to everybody and which no one would ever deny.”

— Paul Gauguin

83. “I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.”

— Paul Gauguin

84. “I am entering into the truth, into nature.”

— Paul Gauguin

85. “But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.”

— Paul Gauguin

86. “A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.”

— Paul Gauguin

87. “By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.”

— Paul Gauguin

88. “Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.”

— Paul Gauguin

89. “I am a great artist and I know it. It’s because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue – which is what many people think I am, for that matter.”

— Paul Gauguin

90. “Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.”

— Paul Gauguin

91. “Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.”

— Paul Gauguin

92. “In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.”

— Paul Gauguin

93. “A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.”

— Paul Gauguin

94. “How to re-light the fire the very ashes of which are scattered?”

— Paul Gauguin

95. “It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.”

— Paul Gauguin

96. “The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain.”

— Paul Gauguin

97. “Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow...”

— Paul Gauguin

98. “Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will.”

— Paul Gauguin

99. “Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist.”

— Paul Gauguin

100. “If instead of a figure you put the shadow only of a person, you have found an original starting point, that strangeness of which you have calculated.”

— Paul Gauguin