Top 400 Vincent Van Gogh Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle – more like music and less like sculpture – and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.”

— Vincent van Gogh

252. “If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?”

— Vincent van Gogh

253. “Everything on earth changes – we have no abiding city here – it is the experience of everybody. That it is God’s will that we should part with what is dearest on earth – we ourselves change in many respects, we are not what we once were, we shall not remain what we are now.”

— Vincent van Gogh

254. “Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.”

— Vincent van Gogh

255. “Painting is a faith and that it brings with it the duty to pay no heed to public opinion – and that in it one conquers by perseverance and not by giving in.”

— Vincent van Gogh

256. “I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours.”

— Vincent van Gogh

257. “I knew well enough that one could fracture one’s legs and arms and recover afterward, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too.”

— Vincent van Gogh

258. “What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.”

— Vincent van Gogh

259. “That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn’t alter the fact that I’m bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!”

— Vincent van Gogh

260. “One must seize the reality of one’s fate and that’s that.”

— Vincent van Gogh

261. “I always dream a painting like that, with a group of lively figures of the pals.”

— Vincent van Gogh

262. “I wanted to make people think of a totally different way of living from that which we, educated people, live. I would absolutely not want anyone to find it beautiful or good without a thought.”

— Vincent van Gogh

263. “Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That’s just what artists lack!”

— Vincent van Gogh

264. “It is not only by one’s impulses that one achieves greatness, but also by patiently filing away the steel wall that separates what one feels from what one is capable of doing.”

— Vincent van Gogh

265. “Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone.”

— Vincent van Gogh

266. “Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.”

— Vincent van Gogh

267. “One should arrive at leading one’s conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.”

— Vincent van Gogh

268. “Study, analyse the social structure – that’s always far more effective than moralising.”

— Vincent van Gogh

269. “I would sooner paint people’s eyes than cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is lacking in a cathedral – however solemn and impressive it may be. To my mind a man’s soul, be it that of a poor beggar or of a streetwalker, is more interesting.”

— Vincent van Gogh

270. “When using colors to recreate a general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation. One keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, and that may not be exactly, or far from exactly, like the model.”

— Vincent van Gogh

271. “I hope I shall be able to make some drawings in which there is something human.”

— Vincent van Gogh

272. “I believe I do much better for the time being by first copying some good things than by working without that foundation.”

— Vincent van Gogh

273. “You don’t know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter, ‘You can’t do a thing’.”

— Vincent van Gogh

274. “It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation – of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things – the thought of God comes into one’s mind.”

— Vincent van Gogh

275. “The worse I get along with people the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her.”

— Vincent van Gogh

276. “And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her – it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton – a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.”

— Vincent van Gogh

277. “I’ve just kept on ceaselessly painting in order to learn painting.”

— Vincent van Gogh

278. “Housed in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the following plate was completed in 1886, portraying the unusual subject of a skeleton smoking a cigarette. The work has roused many interpretations, including a depiction of mortality and a prophetic cry of the dangers of tobacco. In the next two years, van Gogh painted two other paintings with skulls, illustrating his fascination with the macabre subject.”

— Vincent van Gogh

279. “To express the love of two lovers by the marriage of two complementary colours, their blending and their contrast, the mysterious vibrations of related tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a dark background. To express hope by some star. Someone’s passion by the radiance of the setting sun. That’s certainly no realistic trompe l’oeil, but something that really exists, isn’t it?”

— Vincent van Gogh

280. “My opinion is that the best thing would be to work on till art lovers feel drawn toward it of their own accord, instead of having to praise or to explain it.”

— Vincent van Gogh

281. “And then there are painters who never do anything that is no good, who cannot do anything bad, just as there are ordinary people who can do nothing but good.”

— Vincent van Gogh

282. “You can live to be old or young, but you’ll always have moments when you lose your head.”

— Vincent van Gogh

283. “Don’t regret that your life is too easy, mine is rather easy too; I think that life is pretty long and that the time will arrive soon enough in which “another shall gird thee and carry thee where thou wouldst not.”

— Vincent van Gogh

284. “In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.”

— Vincent van Gogh

285. “The simple minded know many things that the wise ignore.”

— Vincent van Gogh

286. “What kind of love was it that I felt when I was twenty? It is difficult to define – my physical passions were very weak then, perhaps because of a few years of great poverty and hard work. But my intellectual passions were strong, meaning that without asking anything in return, without wanting any pity, I wanted only to give, but not to receive. Foolish, wrong, exaggerated, proud, rash – for in love one must not only give, but also take; and, reversing it, one must not only take but also give.”

— Vincent van Gogh

287. “In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.”

— Vincent van Gogh

288. “There are idlers and idlers, who form a contrast.”

— Vincent van Gogh

289. “Whatever plan one makes, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere.”

— Vincent van Gogh

290. “I believe that one thinks much more soundly if the thoughts arise from direct contact with things, than if one looks at things with the aim of finding this or that in them.”

— Vincent van Gogh

291. “Love is the best and the noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire.”

— Vincent van Gogh

292. “Here everything is so wholly what I consider beautiful. In other words, there is peace here.”

— Vincent van Gogh

293. “The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings – not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.”

— Vincent van Gogh

294. “In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint.”

— Vincent van Gogh

295. “Victor Hugo says God is an eclipsing lighthouse, and certainly now we are passing through that eclipse. I only wish that someone could prove to us something calming which comforted us, so that we stopped feeling guilty or unhappy and that we could go forward without losing ourselves in the solitude or nothingness, and without having to fear every step, or to nervously calculate the harm we may unintentionally be doing to others.”

— Vincent van Gogh

296. “That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter.”

— Vincent van Gogh

297. “To the one party, woman is always heresy and diabolical. To me, the opposite.”

— Vincent van Gogh

298. “Do not think too deeply about these things – gradually they will become clearer to you.”

— Vincent van Gogh

299. “At present this horror of life is already less pronounced, and the melancholy less acute. But I still have no will, and hardly any desires, or none at all that are to do with ordinary life.”

— Vincent van Gogh

300. “If I did not succeed I still thought that what I had worked on would be continued. Not immediately. But there are others who believe in things that are true.”

— Vincent van Gogh