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Vincent Van Gogh Quotes - Page 10

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To stick to the present and not let it pass without drawing some profit from it, that's what I think duty is. ...let us perservere as far as we can rather today than tomorrow.

To stick to the present and not let it pass without drawing some profit from it, that's what I think duty is. ...let us perservere as far as we can rather today than tomorrow.

Vincent Van Gogh
Thinking, Drawing, Sticks

I tried to express through red and green the terrible passions of humanity.

Vincent Van Gogh
Passion, Humanity, Green

Love is eternal -- the aspect may change, but not the essence. 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. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work.

Vincent Van Gogh
Love, Motivational, Real

Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death be like autumn leaves. Rabindranath Tagore What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.

Vincent Van Gogh
Beautiful, Death, Summer

I've never felt a desire (and I don't believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work... a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.

Vincent Van Gogh
Believe, Desire, Popularity

As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.

Vincent Van Gogh
Beautiful, Art, Autumn
Vincent van Gogh (1958). “Complete letters: with reproductions of all the drawings in the correspondence”

What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is ... for us humans.

Vincent Van Gogh
Adversity, Bird, Humans

I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin.

Vincent Van Gogh
Ideas, Sunflower, Dozen

Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.

Vincent Van Gogh
Black And White, Color, Green
Vincent van Gogh, Colta Feller Ives (2005). “Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings”, p.173, Metropolitan Museum of Art

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

Vincent Van Gogh
Art, Wall, Iron
H. R. Graetz, Vincent van Gogh (1963). “The Symbolic Language of Vincent Van Gogh”, London, Hudson

Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And let us not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil.

Vincent Van Gogh
Evil, Mind, Trying
Vincent van Gogh (1976). “My life & love are one: quotations from the letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo”, Blue Mountain Press

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Vincent Van Gogh
Beautiful, Dream, Scary
Vincent van Gogh (1987). “Vincent Van Gogh, 1853-1890: Vision and Reality”, Gloucester

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
Believe, Earth, I Believe

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

Vincent Van Gogh
Mistress, Study, Painting
James Smith, Vincent van Gogh (2001). “Essential Van Gogh”, Parragon Incorporated

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

Vincent Van Gogh
Art, Fields, Laborers

Spring is the fresh green of young corn and the pink blush of blossoms. Autumn contrasts the yellowed foilage with violet hues. Winter is the white of snow against its black forms ... Summer is the contrast of blues and the golden bronze of the corn.

Vincent Van Gogh
Summer, Spring, Winter

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
Color, May, Tone

The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.

Vincent Van Gogh
Art, Taken, Mean
Vincent van Gogh (1963). “Letters”, Atheneum Books for Young Readers

I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening...like a light in the midst of the darkness.

Vincent Van Gogh
Heart, Thinking, Light

It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once. To make progress is a kind of miner’s work; it doesn’t advance as quickly as one would like, and as others also expect, but as one stands before such a task, the basic necessities are patience and faithfulness. In fact, I do not think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much one would get stunned or disturbed.

Vincent Van Gogh
Disappointment, Thinking, Drawing
Vincent van Gogh (1963). “Letters”, Atheneum Books for Young Readers

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh
Art, Nature, Reality
Vincent van Gogh, Mark Roskill (1997). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”, p.156, Simon and Schuster

I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.

Vincent Van Gogh
Regret, Passion, Men

Do not become the slave of your model.

Vincent Van Gogh
Slave, Quench, Models
Naomi E. Maurer, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (1998). “The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin”, p.9, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

It astonishes me already when I compare my condition today with what it was a month ago. Before that I knew well enough 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
Brain, Legs, Arms
Vincent van Gogh, Ronald Pickvance (1984). “Van Gogh in Arles”, p.29, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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
Artist, Men, Doe
Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.1439, Delphi Classics

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