Great Throughts Treasury

"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 one that is burning. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work."

"Love is something eternal-the aspects 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 one that is burning. The lamp was there and it is a good lamp, but now it is shedding light, too, and that is its real function."

"Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy."

"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."

"Mauve takes offense at my having said, I am an artist - which I do not take back, because that word included, of course, the meaning: always seeking without absolutely finding. As far as I know, that word means: I am seeking, I am striving, I am in with all my heart."

"My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like – but truer than the literal truth."

"My opinion is that the best thing would be to work on till art lovers feel drawn toward it of their own accord, instead of having to praise or to explain it."

"Modern reality has got such a hold on us that... when we attempt to reconstruct the ancient days in our thoughts...the minor events of our lives tear us away from our meditations, and... thrust us back into our personal [problems]"

"My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life... looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!' But this does not exclude making what is possible..."

"Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously he will not be put off by that opposition."

"Normality is a paved road, you can go well on it - but there are no flowers grow on it."

"Now for the past five years or so, I don't know how long exactly, I have been more or less without permanent employment, wandering from pillar to post. You will say, ever since such and such a time you have been going downhill, you have been feeble, you have done nothing. Is that entirely true?"

"Now it so happens in the world that opposed to characters of such persons as he there are characters like mine, for instance. I care as little for the world's opinion as that man cared for what was right. To appear right was enough for him; what I th"

"Now since I have seen the ocean with my own eyes, I feel completely how important it is for me to stay in the south and to experience the color which must be carried to the uttermost- it is not far to Africa."

"Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don't they both fall into the ditch?"

"Now, there are people who say to me, “Why did you have anything to do with her?” — that's one fact. And there are people who say to her, Why did you have anything to do with him?” — that's another fact."

"Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at all events, I think it such a great blessing."

"Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone."

"Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes."

"Oh, I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime — I have seen through present-day Christianity only too well. That icy coldness hypnotized even me, in my youth — but I have taken my revenge since then. How? By worshipping the love which they, the theologians, call sin, by respecting a whore, etc., and not too many would-be respectable, pious ladies. To some, woman is heresy and diabolical. To me she is just the opposite."

"Oh, Theo, why should I change — I used to be very passive and very gentle and quiet — I'm that no longer, but then I'm no longer a child either now — sometimes I feel my own man."

"One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way."

"One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it."

"One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live."

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

"One of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you."

"Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see."

"Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion."

"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 without spending more on it than one gets back for it; one gets a feeling of shortcomi"

"Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else."

"Only he can be an artist who has a religion all his own - an original way of viewing infinity."

"Only when I fall do I get up again."

"Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground - yet that ground is very dark... in addition red, yellow, brown ochre, black, terra sienna, bistre, and the result is a red-brown that varies from bistre to deep wine-red and to pale, blond reddish."

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

"Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis."

"People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage."

"Quick work doesn't mean less serious work, it depends on one's self-confidence and experience. In the same way Jules Guérard, the lion hunter, says in his book that in the beginning young lions have a lot of trouble killing a horse or an ox, but that the old lions kill with a single blow of the paw or a well-placed bite, and that they are amazingly sure at the job... I must warn you that everyone will think that I work too fast. Don't you believe a word of it. Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one's feeling for nature, that draws us, and if the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, when sometimes the strokes come with a continuity and coherence like words in a speech or a letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will again be hard days, empty of inspiration. So one must strike while the iron is hot, and put the forged bars on one side."

"Perhaps it will seem to you that the sunshine is brighter and that everything has a new charm. At least, I believe this is always the result of a deep love, and it is a beautiful thing. And I believe people who think love prevents one from thinking clearly are wrong; for then one thinks very clearly and is more active than before. And love is something 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 one that is burning. The lamp was there and it was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and in that way, one is more fit for one's work."

"So please don't think that I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and though I have changed, I am the same, and 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, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth? That is what keeps preying on my mind, you see, and then one feels imprisoned by poverty, barred from taking part in this or that project and all sorts of necessities are out of one's reach. As a result one cannot rid oneself of melancholy, one feels emptiness where there might have been friendship and sublime and genuine affection, and one feels dreadful disappointment gnawing at one's spiritual energy, fate seems to stand in the way of affection or one feels a wave of disgust welling up inside. And then one says How long, my God!"

"So let us go forward, quietly, each on his own path,"

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

"Some good must come by clinging to the right. Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction."

"Someday death will take us to another star."

"Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing."

"Sometimes, dear brother, I know so well what I want. I am quite able to do without God, both in my life and in my painting, but what I cannot do without, unwell as I am, is something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create."

"Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me."

"Study, analyze the social structure - that's always far more effective than moralizing."

"Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance."

"Thank God, I have my work, but instead of earning money by it, I need money to be able to work; that is the difficulty. I think there are no signs in my work that indicate that I shall fail. And I am not a person who works slowly or tamely. Drawing becomes a passion with me, and I throw myself into it more and more. I do not have great plans for the future; if for a moment I feel rising within me the desire for a life without care, for prosperity, each time I go fondly back to the trouble and the cares, to a life full of hardship, and think: It is better so; I learn more from it, and make progress. This is not the road on which one perishes. I only hope the trouble and the cares will not become unbearable, and I have confidence I shall succeed in earning enough to keep myself, not in luxury, but as one who eats his bread in the sweat of his brow."

"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 how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, t"