677 Quotes by Vincent Van Gogh

The only thing to do is to go one’s own way, to try one’s best, to make the thing live.

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.

Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored.

I would sooner paint people’s eyes than cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is lacking in a cathedral – however solemn and impressive it may be. To my mind a man’s soul, be it that of a poor beggar or of a streetwalker, is more interesting.

One should arrive at leading one’s conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.

We take death to reach a star.

Love makes one calmer about things, and that way, one is fit for one’s work.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? If you hear a voice within saying ‘You are not a painter’ then by all means paint – and that voice will be silenced.

And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her – it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton – a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.