Quotes from Vincent Van Gogh

The more ugly, old, mean, ill, poor I get, the more I want to take my revenge by producing a brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent. Jewellers too get old and ugly before they learn how to arrange precious stones properly. And arranging the colours in a painting in order to make them vibrate and to enhance their value by their contrasts is something like arranging jewels properly or designing costumes

Now and then when I am writing, I automatically do a small drawing, such as I sent you lately. I did one this morning representing Elijah in the desert under an orange sky, with some hawthorns in the foreground. It is nothing special, but I see it all so clearly before me, and I think that at such moments I could speak about it enthusiastically - may it be given me to do so later on.

There was enough reason for it too, as the whole of France was shaken. Certainly in our eyes the election and its results and its representatives are only symbols. But what it proves once more is that worldly ambition and fame pass away, but the human heart beats the same to this day, in as perfect sympathy with the past of our buried forefathers as with the generation to come.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony, and music inside me.

Moreover, the material problems of the painter's life make it desirable that painters should collaborate and unite (much as they did in the days of the Guilds of St. Luke). If only they would ensure their material well-being, and love one another like friends instead of making one another's life hell, painters would be happier, and in any case less ridiculous, less foolish and less culpable.

Understand that the more clear-cut we are about this, the sooner they will come to you to see them. You yourself do not sell my work, so you are not doing business outside the firm of Boussod V. & Co. by showing it. So you will be acting quite correctly, which is always decent. However, should someone or other want to buy, very good, then they have only to apply directly to me. But be sure of this, if we can stand the siege, my time will come.

Het hart van de mens lijkt erg veel op de zee, het kent zijn stormen, het kent zijn getijden en in zijn diepten liggen ook parels.

I know there are persons who think I ought to resign myself, and that it is against the rules not to consider myself beaten; but if they say of my proposal this summer, "If you sing before breakfast, you will cry before night," then you know the verse, He lost his feather in a fight But knew they'd grow again all right, Far finer than before

one is always in respectable company among rather well-to-do bourgeois, one does not notice this so much perhaps, but if one has dined for years on la vache enragée, as I have, one cannot deny that great misery is a fact that weights the scale.

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.

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.

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.

If you hear a voice within you say ,you cannot paint,' then by all means paint. And that voice will be silenced.

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.

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.

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint. And that voice will be silenced.

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.

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.

Iar, dac? m-aÈ™ hot?rî s? m? las în voia pornirilor mele, nimic nu mi-ar fi mai uÈ™or decât s? m? uit cu dispreÈ› la tot ce-am f?cut È™i s?-mi calc tablourile în picioare, aÈ™a cum face père Cézanne.

Rappard said to me, "A human being is not a lump of peat, since a human being cannot bear being flung into a loft to be forgotten there." And he pointed out that he considered it a great misfortune for me not to be able to live at home. Do please give that some thought.

Mind, as to Gauguin we must not give up the idea of coming to his aid if the suggestion is acceptable as it stands, but we do not need him. So do not think that working alone bothers me, and do not push the affair on my account, be very sure of that.

You have been lucky to meet Guy de Maupassant. I have just read his first book, Des Vers, poems dedicated to his master Flaubert; there is one, "Au bord de l'eau," which is already himself. What Van der Meer of Delft is to Rembrandt among the painters, he is to Zola among the French novelists.

But if Gauguin and his Jewish bankers came tomorrow and asked me for no more than 10 pictures for a society of dealers, and not a society of artists, on my word I do not know if I'd have confidence in it, though I would willingly give 50 to a society of artists.

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.