Quote collection
417 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit."
"In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart"
"There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?"
"Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise."
"If I were to think of and dwell on disastrous possibilities, I could do nothing. I throw myself headlong into my work, and come up again with my studies."
"The worse I get along with people the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her."
"l can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but l cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than l, which is my life — the power to create."
"Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That's just what artists lack!"
"We take death to reach a star"
"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."
"It was Richepin who said somewhere, 'The love of art means loss of real love'... True, but on the other hand, real love makes you disgusted with art."
"What preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way?"
"And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them."
"It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide."
"One can never study nature too much and too hard"
"Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength ... ."
"An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without The Graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor."
"The best pictures are always those one dreams of when one is smoking a pipe in bed, but which never get done. But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature."
"If your inner voice is telling you that you can't paint, by all means, hurry up and paint and silence the voice."
"God sends us pieces of art so that we may see ourselves in them"