Top 400 Vincent Van Gogh Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously does not allow that resistance to put him off his stride; on the contrary, it is that much more of a stimulus to fight for victory.”

— Vincent van Gogh

202. “To understand blue you must first understand yellow and orange.”

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

204. “I consciously choose the dog’s path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter...”

— Vincent van Gogh

205. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

210. “There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love, as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning.”

— Vincent van Gogh

211. “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

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

— Vincent van Gogh

213. “I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.”

— Vincent van Gogh

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.”

— Vincent van Gogh

219. “I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.”

— Vincent van Gogh

220. “Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for diner or coffee. And it has been like that form the beginning.”

— Vincent van Gogh

221. “I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.”

— Vincent van Gogh

222. “I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.”

— Vincent van Gogh

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

— Vincent van Gogh

224. “It’s as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.”

— Vincent van Gogh

225. “As you can see, I am immersing myself in color-I’ve held back from that until now; and I don’t regret it.”

— Vincent van Gogh

226. “Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.”

— Vincent van Gogh

227. “If one hasn’t a horse, one is one’s own horse.”

— Vincent van Gogh

228. “Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us – a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!”

— Vincent van Gogh

229. “I believe more and more that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of His sketches that has turned out badly.”

— Vincent van Gogh

230. “What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came.”

— Vincent van Gogh

231. “In a painting I want to say something comforting.”

— Vincent van Gogh

232. “It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.”

— Vincent van Gogh

233. “Purity of soul and impurity of body can go together.”

— Vincent van Gogh

234. “I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.”

— Vincent van Gogh

235. “If I succeed in putting some warmth and love into the work, then it will find friends. Carrying on working is the.”

— Vincent van Gogh

236. “A woman is not old as long as she loves and is loved.”

— Vincent van Gogh

237. “In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart.”

— Vincent van Gogh

238. “A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.”

— Vincent van Gogh

239. “Van Gogh was so under appreciated in his time, he sold only one of his 900 paintings while alive. Posthumously, he became one of the most famous artists of all time and his work is now considered priceless. Oh the irony.”

— Vincent van Gogh

240. “For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.”

— Vincent van Gogh

241. “I have had no “guidance or teaching” from others to speak of, but taught myself; no wonder my technique, considered superficially, differs from that of others. But that’s no reason for my work to remain unsaleable. I feel pretty sure that the large “Sorrow,” “The Old Woman of the Geest,” the “Old Man,” and others, will find a purchaser someday.”

— Vincent van Gogh

242. “No, no thought to the winnings. One loves because one loves.”

— Vincent van Gogh

243. “Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.”

— Vincent van Gogh

244. “But by fighting the difficulties in which one finds oneself, an inner strength develops from within our heart, which improves in life’s fight.”

— Vincent van Gogh

245. “My brushwork is quite unsystematic. I slam the paint on in all sorts of ways and leave each result to take care of itself.”

— Vincent van Gogh

246. “When I have a model who is quiet and steady and with whom I am acquainted, then I draw repeatedly ’til there is one drawing that is different from the rest, which does not look like an ordinary study, but more typical and with more feeling.”

— Vincent van Gogh

247. “Whoever lives sincerely and encounters much trouble and disappointment without being bowed down is worth more than one who has always sailed before the wind and has only known prosperity.”

— Vincent van Gogh

248. “If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it.”

— Vincent van Gogh

249. “I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.”

— Vincent van Gogh

250. “One night I went for a walk by the sea along the empty shore. It was not gay, but neither was it sad; it was- beautiful. The deep blue sky was flicked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. On the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, rose, brighter, flashing more like jewels than they do even in Paris. The sea was a very deep ultramarine.”

— Vincent van Gogh