Top 400 Vincent Van Gogh Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 9

151. “My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.”

— Vincent van Gogh

152. “I am risking my life for my work, and half my reason has gone.”

— Vincent van Gogh

153. “We must not judge God from this world. It’s just a study that didn’t come off. It’s only a master who could make such a blunder.”

— Vincent van Gogh

154. “People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don’t know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.”

— Vincent van Gogh

155. “But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.”

— Vincent van Gogh

156. “I can’t change the fact that my paintings don’t sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.”

— Vincent van Gogh

157. “The lamps are burning and the starry sky is over it all.”

— Vincent van Gogh

158. “To die for the sake of dying – I prefer to die of passion than to die of boredom!”

— Vincent van Gogh

159. “Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and continuous observations. By persistent, I mean not only continuous work, but also not giving up your opinion at the bidding of such and such a person.”

— Vincent van Gogh

160. “The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

— Vincent van Gogh

161. “Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”

— Vincent van Gogh

162. “What preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way?”

— Vincent van Gogh

163. “So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress.”

— Vincent van Gogh

164. “It seems to me it’s a painter’s duty to try to put an idea into his work.”

— Vincent van Gogh

165. “Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.”

— Vincent van Gogh

166. “It is the language of nature to which one has to listen.”

— Vincent van Gogh

167. “I want to paint humanity, humanity and again humanity.”

— Vincent van Gogh

168. “It is the painting that makes me so happy these days.”

— Vincent van Gogh

169. “At times it is not easy for me to take up living again.”

— Vincent van Gogh

170. “The earth from afar shines like a star.”

— Vincent van Gogh

171. “Love makes one calmer about things, and that way, one is fit for one’s work.”

— Vincent van Gogh

172. “It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn’t easy to paint oneself either.”

— Vincent van Gogh

173. “In an artist’s life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.”

— Vincent van Gogh

174. “To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.”

— Vincent van Gogh

175. “But one doesn’t expect out of life what one has already learned that it cannot give, but rather one begins to see more and more clearly that life is only a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not here.”

— Vincent van Gogh

176. “If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.”

— Vincent van Gogh

177. “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make an arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully.”

— Vincent van Gogh

178. “How difficult it is to be simple!”

— Vincent van Gogh

179. “The way to know life is to love many things.”

— Vincent van Gogh

180. “The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.”

— Vincent van Gogh

181. “We are surrounded by poetry on all sides...”

— Vincent van Gogh

182. “Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.”

— Vincent van Gogh

183. “But for one’s health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.”

— Vincent van Gogh

184. “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.”

— Vincent van Gogh

185. “The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.”

— Vincent van Gogh

186. “I want to paint what I feel, and feel what I paint.”

— Vincent van Gogh

187. “It’s better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.”

— Vincent van Gogh

188. “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.”

— Vincent van Gogh

189. “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.”

— Vincent van Gogh

190. “When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.”

— Vincent van Gogh

191. “So let us go forward quietly, each on his own path, forever making for the light.”

— Vincent van Gogh

192. “I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do, and at such a moment one feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.”

— Vincent van Gogh

193. “How much sadness there is in life. Still, it won’t do to become depressed, one should turn to other things, and the right thing is work, but there are times when one can only find peace of mind in the realization: I, too, shall not be spared by unhappiness.”

— Vincent van Gogh

194. “I felt my energy return and that I said to myself, in any event I’ll recover from it, I’ll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I’ll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me.”

— Vincent van Gogh

195. “I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.”

— Vincent van Gogh

196. “To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.”

— Vincent van Gogh

197. “Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.”

— Vincent van Gogh

198. “Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man’s soul.”

— Vincent van Gogh

199. “The more ugly, old, nasty, ill, and poor I become the more I want to get my own back by producing vibrant, well-arranged, radiant colour.”

— Vincent van Gogh

200. “I lost my job as an art salesman. It was the customer’s fault. He wanted to buy the wrong paintings.”

— Vincent van Gogh