Vincent Van Gogh

In trees, I see expression and soul

I never get tired of the blue sky.

Drawing is the root of everything.

Here everything is so wholly what I consider beautiful. In other words, there is peace here.

Great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.

What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.

The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.

But after all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gap

Whatever plan one makes, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere.

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.

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.

I always think photographs abominable, and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love. Those photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love.

To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.

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.

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.

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

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

Conscience is a man's compass.