Quotes by Vincent van Gogh

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

I dream my painting and I paint my dream.

I confess I do not know why, but looking at the stars always makes me dream.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life

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.

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.

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

Close friends are truly lifes treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.

Where friendship blooms, life is reborn.

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.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.

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

A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.

What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.

The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings—not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.

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.