Paul Gauguin Quotes

Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.

Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!

Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

I have come to an unalterable decision - to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.

I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.

Art = a mad search for individualism.

Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.

The single most powerful tool for winning a negotiation is the ability to get up and walk away from the table without a deal

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

Civilization is what makes you sick.

In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.

My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.