Quotes from Vincent Van Gogh

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.

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

In my view, I am often immensely rich, not in money, but (although just now perhaps not all the time) rich because I have found my metier, something I can devote myself to heart and soul and that gives inspiration and meaning to my life.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: "He is the one." But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.

Bookstores always remind me that there are good things in this world

To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and drink one's coffee in peace

I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends.

To understand blue you must first understand yellow and orange

An artist needn't be a clergyman or a church warden, but he must have a warm heart for his fellow men

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

to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

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.

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work...and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after.

In would rather die of passion than of boredom.

be careful not to become narrow-minded, or afraid of reading what is well written, quite the contrary, such writings are a source of comfort in life.

I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made..

The more ugly, old, nasty, ill, and poor I become the more I want to get my own back by producing vibrant, well-arranged, radiant colour.

The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.

That is how I look at it; to continue, to continue, that is what is necessary.

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