Top 400 Vincent Van Gogh Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 9

151. “That is how I look at it; to continue, to continue, that is what is necessary.”

— Vincent van Gogh

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

156. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

158. “To know life, one must love many things.”

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

163. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

174. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

179. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

181. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

183. “Drawing is the root of everything.”

— Vincent van Gogh

184. “I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.”

— Vincent van Gogh

185. “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

186. “An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without The Graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor.”

— Vincent van Gogh

187. “There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing – on the contrary, isn’t it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?”

— Vincent van Gogh

188. “Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.”

— Vincent van Gogh

189. “I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.”

— Vincent van Gogh

190. “I believe it is one’s duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love.”

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

192. “Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.”

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

194. “Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.”

— Vincent van Gogh

195. “I myself am quite absorbed by the delicate yellow, delicate soft green, delicate violet of a ploughed and weeded piece of soil.”

— Vincent van Gogh

196. “The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.”

— Vincent van Gogh

197. “To me, that book has been both a revelation and a gospel.”

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

199. “Yellow is capable of charming God.”

— Vincent van Gogh

200. “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