I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.

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.

You write in your letter something which I sometimes feel also: Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through.

I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible – and then I lose consciousness of...

In my painting of the ‘All -Night Cafe’ I’ve tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, become crazy and criminal. Through the contrast of the delicate...

..it has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of a painting.

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

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

For me, the work is an absolute necessity. I cannot put it off; I don’t care for anything else; that is to say, the pleasure in something else ceases at once, and I become melancholy...

Look here, I often feel the same in more than one respect–not just in financial things, but in art itself, and in life in general. But do you think it’s anything exceptional? Don’t you think...

It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in...

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

There are often beams in our eye that we know not of. Let us therefore ask that our eye may become single, for then we ourselves shall become wholly single.

I have … a terrible need … shall I say the word? … of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.

You will say that everyone has seen landscapes and figures from childhood on. The question is: Has everybody also been reflexive as a child? Has everybody who has seen them also loved heath, fields, meadows,...

I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’

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...

The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.

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

That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such- be it so; but I love, and...

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life, the...

The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken...

Love is eternal – the aspect may change, but not the essence. There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as there is in an unlighted lamp and...

If one keeps loving faithfully what is really worth loving, and does not waste one’s love on insignificant and unworthy and meaningless things, one will get more light by and by and grow stronger. Sometimes...

Only when I fall do I get up again.

What I am 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...

If you hear a voice within you saying, ”You are not a painter,” then by all means paint ‘¦ and that voice will be silenced.

How difficult it is to be simple.

The best way to know God is to love many things.

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...

Fortunately for me, I know well enough what I want, and am basically utterly indifferent to the criticism that I work to hurriedly. In answer to that, I have done some things even more hurriedly...

There may be a time in life when one is tired of everything and feels as if all one does is wrong, and there maybe some truth in it- do you think this is a...

And sometimes there is relief, sometimes there is new inner energy, and one stands up after it; till at last, someday, one perhaps doesn’t stand up any more, que soit, but that is nothing extraordinary,...

How right it is to love flowers and the greenery of pines and ivy and hawthorn hedges; they have been with us from the very beginning.

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.

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; if the storm within gets too...

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

I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though defeated here and there; and even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things...

La tristesse durera toujours.[The sadness will last forever.]

It’s better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite,...

The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

One wants to be an honest man; one is so, one works hard; but still one cannot make both ends meet; on must give up the work, there is no chance of carrying it out...

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

I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at...

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,...