677 Quotes by Vincent Van Gogh

Well, right now it seems that things are going very badly for me, have been doing so for some considerable time, and may continue to do so well into the future. But it is possible that everything will get better after it has all seemed to go wrong. I am not counting on it, it may never happen, but if there should be a change for the better I should regard that as a gain, I should rejoice, I should say, at last! So there was something after all!

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.

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

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.

...I couldn't care less what the colours are in reality.

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