Vincent Van Gogh Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Vincent Van Gogh Motivational Quotations:

• “Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.”

•  “Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”

•  “If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere.”

•  “I never get tired of the blue sky.”

•  “Close friends are truly life's 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.”

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

•  “If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”

•  “If you end up falling in love with someone, it's because of them. If you end up hating someone, it's because of you.”

• “Art is to console those who are broken by life.”

•  “I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.”

  

• “Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.”

•  “What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.”

•  “I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”

•  “For great things do not done just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.”

•  “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”

•  “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

•  “The more you love, the more you suffer.”

•  “I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.”

•  “Benjamin Murphy is the best artist since sliced bread.”

•  “But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will.”

•  “Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.”

•  “I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter.”

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

•  “The great artist is the simplifier.”

•  “Only when I fall do I get up again.”

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

•  “What is done in love is done well.”

•  “If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.”

•  “The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.”

•  “I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.”

•  “Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for diner or coffee. And it has been like that form the beginning.”

•  “Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.”

•  “Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.”

•  “At times it is not easy for me to take up living again.”

•  “You have first to experience what you want to express.”

•  “Great things do not just happen by impulse, but as a succession of small things linked together.”

•  “Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.”

•  “I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.”

•  “Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures.”

•  “Do not think too deeply about these things - gradually they will become clearer to you”

•  “Everywhere we look, complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.”

•  “It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.”

•  “Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague.”

•  “So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.”

•  “In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.”

•  “But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.”

•  “Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.”

•  “Purity of soul and impurity of body can go together.”

•  “Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, 'What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.' Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”

•  “If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

•  “Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.”

• “Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.”

• “Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.”

• “I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time... the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.”

• “Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.”

•  “I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.”

•  “Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.”

•  “In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.”

•  “In my view, I am often immensely rich, not in money, but (although just now perhaps not all the time) rich because I have found my metier, something I can devote myself to heart and soul and that gives inspiration and meaning to my life.”

  

   

• “It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.”

•  “Doing little things well is a step toward doing big things better.”

•  “Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.”

•  “It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once. To make progress is a kind of miner’s work; it doesn’t advance as quickly as one would like, and as others also expect, but as one stands before such a task, the basic necessities are patience and faithfulness. In fact, I do not think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much one would get stunned or disturbed.”

•  “But on the road that I'm on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don't study, if I don't keep on trying, then I'm lost, then woe betide me. That's how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that's what's needed.”

•  “At one time, the earth was supposed to be flat. Well, so it is, even today, from Paris to Asnieres. But that fact doesn't prevent science from proving that the earth as a whole is spherical. No one nowadays denies it. Well...we are still at the stage of believing that life itself is flat, the distance from birth to death. Yet the probability is that life, too, is spherical and much more extensive and capacious than the hemisphere we know.”

•  “If I succeed in putting some warmth and love into the work, then it will find friends. Carrying on working is the”