Top 40 Susan Vreeland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Think hard before you begin, then enter the work.”

— Susan Vreeland

2. “No need to worry. Diamonds are made under pressure, and you’re our brilliant Claire.”

— Susan Vreeland

3. “It’s better to have a hunger and appreciation for beauty than to be merely beautiful. In the end, life is richer that way. She may learn that.”

— Susan Vreeland

4. “If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.”

— Susan Vreeland

5. “No matter where life takes you... the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard and love wide and love long, and you will find goodness in it.”

— Susan Vreeland

6. “Look long enough, out or in, and you’ll be glad you are who you are.”

— Susan Vreeland

7. “What the world calls failure, I call learning.”

— Susan Vreeland

8. “No matter where life takes you,’ she said, ’the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground.”

— Susan Vreeland

9. “Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life.”

— Susan Vreeland

10. “A woman can’t stay hard when all around her is loveliness.”

— Susan Vreeland

11. “If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal.”

— Susan Vreeland

12. “Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives,” he told them. “Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.”

— Susan Vreeland

13. “Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.”

— Susan Vreeland

14. “Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.”

— Susan Vreeland

15. “A year passes like a revolving wheel, and when the spoke of January comes round again, it finds itself in a different place. And so with pain. It does not leave us where it found us.”

— Susan Vreeland

16. “You know, bicycling isn’t just a matter of balance,” I said. “it’s a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I’m going to call that the Bicyclist’s Philosophy of Life.”

— Susan Vreeland

17. “Find some beauty along the way.”

— Susan Vreeland

18. “She remembered wishing, one particular morning... that she might someday have someone to write to, that she could write at the end of a letter full of love and news, “As ever, your loving Magdalena Elisabeth.”

— Susan Vreeland

19. “The notion of lovers living together is altogether too demanding. One can be caught so unready.”

— Susan Vreeland

20. “He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it.”

— Susan Vreeland

21. “If a person loves something above all else, if he values the work of his heart and hands, then he should naturally, without hesitation, pour into it his whole soul, undivided and pure. Great art demands nothing less.”

— Susan Vreeland

22. “She wasn’t at peace the way that artist painted her. She was leaning forward, and the rigidness of her spine showed the ache in her soul. She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just liker her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing...”

— Susan Vreeland

23. “Things will change, Father. They must. And art can help create the change.”

— Susan Vreeland

24. “Her chest ached like a dull wound when she realized that her silence did not cause him a moment’s reflection or curiosity. When she looked out the corner of her eye at him, she could not tell what she meant to him... Another wish that never would come true, she saw then, even if she lived forever, was that he, that someone, would look at her not as an artistic study, but with love.”

— Susan Vreeland

25. “God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.”

— Susan Vreeland

26. “I’ve come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it.”

— Susan Vreeland

27. “This girl, when she became a woman, would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with her beloved.”

— Susan Vreeland

28. “Surely a woman, not just a painter, needs a place where she can nurture her individuality, where she can become. Pascal.”

— Susan Vreeland

29. “Never did she succumb to the cowardice of self-pity. I had fancied love a causal adjunct and not the central turning shaft making all the parts move. I had not stood astonished before the power of its turning.”

— Susan Vreeland

30. “If, indeed, that was love, it wasn’t enough.”

— Susan Vreeland

31. “Therefore, what I had been taught to fear I now embraced. Betrayal- his or mine, it didn’t matter- freed me.”

— Susan Vreeland

32. “Poor fool, ruining his life for a piece of cloth smeared with mineral paste, for a fake, I had to tell myself, a mere curiosity.”

— Susan Vreeland

33. “At some times in our lives, our passion makes us perpetrators of hurt and loss. At other times we are the ones who are hurt – all in the name of art. Sometimes we get what we want. Sometimes we pay for another to get what he or she wants.”

— Susan Vreeland

34. “She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within the tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kisses and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven’s rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedge together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth.”

— Susan Vreeland

35. “Oh, there had been occasions of passion, but was that love? I had a sentimental notion... that love meant one would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with the beloved.”

— Susan Vreeland

36. “To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea.”

— Susan Vreeland

37. “The heaviness of forgiveness descended the moment after I wrote the words.”

— Susan Vreeland

38. “A moon of startling brightness rose over the rooftops, lifted on a divine, invisible thread...”

— Susan Vreeland

39. “To celebrate, I decorated my mess tin with a yellow dandelion blossom. It looked like the sun I so rarely see. Van Gogh would have liked it.”

— Susan Vreeland

40. “His intensity was magnetic, irresistible.”

— Susan Vreeland