Van Gogh Quotes

“The sadness will last forever.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

“Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that is the focus of the story we need – connection.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made..”
― Vincent van Gogh

“My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“In the following days the twins went all over the city; they visited more museums, particularly the avant-garde ones. Whenever Magda spotted a Van Gogh her eyes would fill with tears, remembering the aberrational agony this great artist had gone through. The work that stirred her most was one of those many self-portraits of the artist in a sober and tormented mood; a painting built by many heavy brushstrokes of dense undiluted paint applied spirally giving the impression that the image was materializing from a turquoise background. Magda spent a full ten minutes before one such portrait. When she returned back to earth she noticed a young man beside her, as absorbed with the painting as she was and whose face looked familiar.”
― Anton Sammut, Memories of Recurrent Echoes

“For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“At present this horror of life is already less pronounced, and the melancholy less acute. But I still have no will, and hardly any desires, or none at all that are to do with ordinary life.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine.”
― Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

“I’m happy to just be able to come across things. I don’t need to be happy. Happiness is a kind of cheap word. Let’s face it, I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something. I would commit suicide. I would shoot myself in the brain if things got bad. I would jump from a window…you know, I can think about death openly. It’s nothing to fear. It’s nothing sacred. I’ve seen so many people die. Life’s not sacred either”
― Bob Dylan, The Essential Interviews

“I keep hoping that I’ll come up with something. To express the love of two lovers by the marriage of two complementary colours, their blending and their contrast, the mysterious vibrations of related tones. To express that thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a dark background. To express hope by some star. Someone’s passion by the radiance of the setting sun.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Dans chaque vie où de la pluie doit tomber, quelques jours seront sombres et lugubres – c'est vrai, il ne peut en aller autrement, et pourtant je me demande si le nombre de jours sombres et lugubres peut parfois devenir trop grand ? La lutte intérieure de Van Gogh: Sa vie, son œuvre et sa maladie mentale - Liesbeth Heenk”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Van Gogh's sunflowers, it seems, are wilting, just like their real-life counterparts did.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“What I am in the eyes of most people — a nonetity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“He was still on his “two Van Goghs” point. He put his hand on the armrest of her chair. He said, “But the second Van Gogh is just a guy named Vincent. Vincent lived for thirty-seven years. Van Gogh only came to life after Vincent died. Same man, two people.”
― Victor LaValle, The Devil in Silver

“You can’t live that wild, in public, without the collective consciousness figuring out a way to suicide you.”
― Jarett Kobek, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World

“It’s funny,” John says, “how piano keys are black and white, yet they play a thousand different colors.”
“‘Cept there ain’t no piyana,” Captain Clark shushes.
John’s face goes blank. “Really? I thought I heard one.”
Captain Clark looks at me, almost apologetically. “He’s got Van Gogh’s ear fer music.”
― Michael Benzehabe, Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe

“And I got the like, crazy mental illness, so like, maybe someday they'll be like, 'Yeah, he was like Rembrandt, or, uh, Picasso, only he didn't, he didn't cut his ear off, but he ate his own shit. That's so funny, dude. Oh, that's so funny. I'm glad I'm secure in my own idiocy.”
― Aaron Kyle Andresen

“To me, that book has been both a revelation and a gospel.”
― Vinvent Van Gogh

“If Van Gogh were walking around, everyone would run away because he had no ear, but if he was holding his paintings they would be nice to him. She's holding her paintings and she's good at it.”
― Caroline Kepnes, Providence

“Van Gogh escrevendo ao irmão pedindo tintas
[...]
a impossibilidade de ser humano
[...]
Shakespeare um plagiador
[...]
demasiado humano
[...]”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“Iedere ochtend zag Vincent uit het raam van het atelier hoe het voorjaar forser over de zelfkant van de stad streek: geen lachende fee die in pastelkleurige sluiers kwam aangehuppeld, maar een bolle boerenmeid, zwaar op de benen, die rokken aan had met verstellappen erop en naar gier en geploegde aarde rook. De roeken zwermden over de knotwilgen, de rook sloeg driftiger neer vanaf de spoorbaan, langs het landweggetje voor Vincents huis glommen de plekken kolengruis natter en zwarter. Boven een verwiste horizon hingen rafelig getornde wolken, de kleuren waren guur, blauw, groen en stuurs. Hij keek naar de gravers en mestrijders op de landpaden en in de bouwveldjes, de oude mensen die hier kwamen aanschuifelen in de eerste fladderige plekjes zonneschijn; ze hadden de kleur en bijna de vorm van oud knoestig geboomte; hij volgde hun bewegingen met spanning; hij trachtte hen snel te tekenen.”
― Teun de Vries

“Keiner hat je geschrieben oder gemalt, geformt, modelliert, gebaut oder erfunden, es sei denn, um der Hölle zu entkommen.”
― Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh le suicidé de la société

“And I got the like, crazy mental illness, so like, maybe someday they'll be like, 'Yeah, he was like Rembrandt, or, uh, Picasso, only he didn't, he didn't cut his ear off, but he ate his own shit'. That's so funny, dude. Oh, that's so funny. I'm glad I'm secure in my own idiocy.”
― Aaron Kyle Andresen

“And just as this illness changed his life, and hers, and Claudette's and their house on rue de l'Agneau, so it changed that old, cracked globe. It felt different in her hands--smaller. She'd hold it like an egg that could break under her touch. Because now Jeanne's mind could not be on future of foreign countries, it had to be on the cutting up of food, the emptying of chamber pots. Her life moved around her father, and loving him more closely--and how could she resent this?”
― Susan Fletcher

“It was a starry night, something out of a fake Vincent Van Gogh painting. Crisp, according to nipples. It smelled freshly of just-missed-rain.”
― Kyle St Germain, Dysfunction

“MAN: Hi, I’ve just self-published my art book. My friends tell me that I’m set to be the new Van Gogh. How many copies of my book would you like to pre-order?
BOOKSELLER: You know, Van Gogh was never appreciated in his lifetime.
MAN: …”
― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops