Top 400 Vincent Van Gogh Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It is good to love many things.”

— Vincent van Gogh

302. “An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.”

— Vincent van Gogh

303. “Anyone who leads an upright life and experiences real difficulty and disappointment and yet is not crushed by them is worth more than one for whom everything has always been plain sailing and who has known nothing but relative prosperity.”

— Vincent van Gogh

304. “Every man must bear his own burden.”

— Vincent van Gogh

305. “One begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order to be true to nature, and one concludes by working quietly from one’s own palette alone, and then nature is the result.”

— Vincent van Gogh

306. “One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.”

— Vincent van Gogh

307. “I myself believe that there is in every painter’s life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.”

— Vincent van Gogh

308. “But always those same conventional eyes, noses, mouths – waxlike and smooth and cold. It cannot but always remain lifeless. And the painted portraits have a life of their own, coming straight from the painter’s soul, which the machine cannot reach. The more one looks at photographs, the more one feels this, I think.”

— Vincent van Gogh

309. “I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.”

— Vincent van Gogh

310. “Painting a picture is as difficult as finding a large or a small diamond. Now, however, whereas everybody recognizes the value of a louis d’or or a pure pearl, those who cherish pictures and believe in them are unfortunately rare. But they exist nonetheless.”

— Vincent van Gogh

311. “Yet even then I do not think that my madness would take the form of persecution mania, since when in a state of excitement my feelings lead me rather to the contemplation of eternity, and eternal life. But all the same I must beware of my nerves, etc.”

— Vincent van Gogh

312. “It is possible that these great geniuses are only madmen, and that one must be mad oneself to have boundless faith in them and a boundless admiration for them. If this is true, I should prefer my insanity to the sanity of the others.”

— Vincent van Gogh

313. “Sorrow is better than joy – and even in mirth the heart is sad – and it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasts, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. Our nature is sorrowful but for those who have learnt and are learning to look at Jesus Christ, there is always reason to rejoice.”

— Vincent van Gogh

314. “It is true, however, that first impressions often change, for we know only too well that all is not gold that glitters and that though there may be a bright dawn, there is also a dark midnight and a burning, oppressive heat at noon.”

— Vincent van Gogh

315. “If I should later come to see that I did wrong, well, then I shall of course be sorry, but as it is I have been unable to see how else I could possibly have acted. When somebody tells me decisively, ‘Get out of my house, the sooner the better, in half an hour rather than an hour,’ well then, my dear fellow, it doesn’t take a quarter of an hour for me to leave, never to return either.”

— Vincent van Gogh

316. “Goodbye, write again between times if you can. As to the money, do what you can, but remember that we must try our utmost to succeed. And I won’t let that idea of painting portraits go, for it is a good thing to fight for, to show people that there is more in them than the photographer can possibly get out of them with his machine.”

— Vincent van Gogh

317. “Benjamin Murphy is the best artist since sliced bread.”

— Vincent van Gogh

318. “O never think the dead are dead, So long as there are men alive, The dead will live, the dead will live.” That’s how I feel it. Nothing sadder than that.”

— Vincent van Gogh

319. “I, for my part, am always glad that I have read the Bible more carefully than many people do nowadays, just because it gives me some peace of mind to know that there used to be such lofty ideals.”

— Vincent van Gogh

320. “What I am in the eyes of most people – a nonetity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person – somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.”

— Vincent van Gogh

321. “In the midst of life we are near death, that is a phrase which touches each one of us personally, it is a truth we see again confirmed in what you tell me about Carolien van Stockum, and formerly we saw it in another member of the same family. It has touched me, and with all my heart I hope she may recover. Oh! what sorrow, what sadness and suffering there is in the world, in public as well as in private life.”

— Vincent van Gogh

322. “I believe that if we knew everything we should attain some serenity. Now, having as much of that serenity as possible, even when one knows little or nothing for certain, is perhaps a better remedy for all ills than what is sold in the pharmacy. Much of it comes by itself, one grows and develops of one’s own accord.”

— Vincent van Gogh

323. “According to Theo, he is definitely making a name for himself. But we are under no illusions, and are only too grateful that he is having some slight success. You don’t know what a hard life he has had, and who can say what is still in store for him. His disappointments have often made him fell bitter and have turned him into an unusual person.”

— Vincent van Gogh

324. “As to this region here, I know the country and the people too well and love them too much to be positively leaving them for good. I shall try to rent a room where I can put my things, and shall be safe then, in case I want to leave Antwerp for a time or if I get homesick for the country.”

— Vincent van Gogh

325. “And that I relinquished my share in the inheritance; inasmuch as during the last years I had lived in great discord with my father, I felt I did not have a right to anything that was his, and for that matter I did not covet it. You will agree with me that this puts a definite stop to all disagreements with my family. So there is an end of them, and otherwise I am on quite good terms with those at home.”

— Vincent van Gogh

326. “In Antwerp I did not even know what the impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much admired certain.”

— Vincent van Gogh

327. “Today, Friday, I went there but could not see him. The intern and the attendant told me that after my wife left, he had had a terrible attack; he had a very bad night, and they had to put him in an isolated room. Since he has been locked in this room, he has eaten no food and utterly refused to talk. That is the exact state of your brother at present.”

— Vincent van Gogh

328. “Thank you very much too for all the steps you have taken toward the exhibition of the Independents. On the whole I’m very glad that they’ve been put with the other impressionists.”

— Vincent van Gogh

329. “If I were living near you, I should try to make you understand that it might perhaps be more practical for you to paint with me than to write, and that you might be able to express your feelings more easily that way. In any case I can do something personally about your painting, but I am not in the writing profession.”

— Vincent van Gogh

330. “People who do nothing but fall in love are perhaps more serious and saintly than those who sacrifice their love and their hearts to an idea.”

— Vincent van Gogh

331. “The rest certainly must seem damn bad.” And the days when I bring home a study I say to myself – If it was like this every day, we might be able to get on; but the days when you come back empty-handed, and eat and sleep and spend money all the same, you don’t think much of yourself, and you feel like a fool and a shirker and a good-for-nothing.”

— Vincent van Gogh

332. “Is the Bible enough for us? These days I think Jesus himself would say again to those who sit down in melancholy, “It is not here, it is risen. Why seek ye the living among the dead?”

— Vincent van Gogh

333. “You must not go there in too anemic or enervated a condition, if you set a value on coming out of it stronger. I do not consider it a great misfortune for you to be obliged to be a soldier, but rather as a very serious trial from which you will emerge – if you emerge at all – a very great artist.”

— Vincent van Gogh

334. “I must tell you that even while working I think continually about the plan of setting up a studio in which you and I will be permanent residents, but which both of us want to turn into a shelter and refuge for friends, against the times when they find that the struggle is getting too much for them.”

— Vincent van Gogh

335. “So now, when anyone says that such and such is done too quickly, you can reply that they have looked at it too quickly.”

— Vincent van Gogh

336. “The clergymen call us sinners, conceived and born in sin. Bah! What confounded nonsense that is. Is it a sin to love, to feel the need for love, not to be able to live without love? I consider a life without love a sinful and immoral state.”

— Vincent van Gogh

337. “It does one good to read things like that, more than most of the stuff the decadents write, with their passion for saying the most obvious things in the most wildly contorted phrases.”

— Vincent van Gogh

338. “During the past few years he has been working at home with us; after my father’s death, Anna thought it would be more peaceful for Mother if he stopped living at home, and saw to it that he left us. He took that so badly that from then on he has not been in touch with us, and it is only through Theo that we have news of him.”

— Vincent van Gogh

339. “Fortunately for me, I do not hanker after victory any more, and all that I seek in painting is a way to make life bearable.”

— Vincent van Gogh

340. “There was a time when I loved Vincent a lot and he was my best friend but that is over now. It seems to be even worse from his side, for he never loses an opportunity to show me that he despises me and that I revolt him. That makes the situation at home almost unbearable.”

— Vincent van Gogh

341. “Still, I went with Vincent a few times to listen to a Wagner concert before he left, and we both liked it very much. It still seems strange that he has gone, he has lately meant so much to me.”

— Vincent van Gogh

342. “I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we didn’t dare to take things in hand?”

— Vincent van Gogh

343. “To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not something that actually exists?”

— Vincent van Gogh

344. “What am I in the eyes of most people –a nonentity or an eccentric or an obnoxious person –someone who has no position in society and never will have, in short the lowest of the low. Well, then –even if that were all absolutely true, I should one day like to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.”

— Vincent van Gogh

345. “Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.”

— Vincent van Gogh

346. “I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject; but still I don’t invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find it already there. It’s a question of picking out what one wants from nature.”

— Vincent van Gogh

347. “To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones...”

— Vincent van Gogh

348. “My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like – but truer than the literal truth.”

— Vincent van Gogh

349. “Do not become the slave of your model.”

— Vincent van Gogh

350. “There is no such thing as an ugly woman.”

— Vincent van Gogh