Quote collection
417 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Well, do you know what I hope for, once I allow myself to begin to hope? [...] That you find in your love for people something not only to work for, but to comfort and restore you when there is a need."
"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."
"And love makes one calmer about many things, and in that way, one is more fit for one's work."
"If you work with love and intelligence, you develop a kind of armour against people's opinions, just because of the sincerity of your love for nature and art. Nature is also severe and, to put it that way, hard, but never deceives and always helps you to move forward."
"Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes."
"It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it."
"What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it."
"One should arrive at leading one's conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant."
"I want to do drawings which touch some people... In either figure or landscape I wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow."
"To paint nature you must be in it a long time."
"I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones."
"There is something intimate about painting I cannot explain to you ? but it is so delightful just for expressing one's feelings."
"My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like - but truer than the literal truth."
"Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour."
"I myself am quite absorbed by the delicate yellow, delicate soft green, delicate violet of a ploughed and weeded piece of soil."
"Modern reality has got such a hold on us that... when we attempt to reconstruct the ancient days in our thoughts...the minor events of our lives tear us away from our meditations, and... thrust us back into our personal [problems]"
"If you work diligently... without saying to yourself beforehand, 'I want to make this or that,' if you work as though you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupation, you will not always find you do well. But the days you least expect it, you will find a subject which holds its own with the work of those who have gone before."
"a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer."
"Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything."
"Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground - yet that ground is very dark."