Quotes from Paul Gauguin

I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.

My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist!

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.

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

Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy antique beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature.

Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

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

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.

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.

Having the certitude of a succession of days... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.

Civilization is paralysis.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

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

Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain.

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

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