Paul Gauguin Quotes - Page 4

I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.

A meter of green is greener than a centimeter.

How do you see those tree?... They are yellow. Well then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I'd rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!

Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.

The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.

I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.

Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.

No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!

Go on working, freely and furiously, you will make progress and sooner or later your worth will be recognised, if you have any.

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

The cyclone ends. The sun returns; the lofty coconut trees lift up their plumes again; man does likewise. The great anguish is over; joy has returned; the sea smiles like a child.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.

Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent...When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion?

Without delay I began work, without hesitation and all of a fever.

Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow.

You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.

Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second... You see the sequence.

There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme.

However depressed I may be I am not in the habit of giving up a project without having tried everything, even the 'impossible', to gain my end.

In art one is concerned with the condition of the spirit for three quarters of the time; one must therefore care for oneself if he wishes to make something great and lasting.

A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!