There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing – on the contrary, isn’t it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?
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.
How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.
I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better.
I myself believe that there is in every painter’s life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.
The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.
The more you love, the more you suffer.
I believe I do much better for the time being by first copying some good things than by working without that foundation.
We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.
We take death to reach a star.
I would like to leave this world and never return. I severed my ear, but how I wish that I had severed my heart. I shall never amount to anything.
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 on a tint of rose or gray.
The painter of the future will be a colorist unlike anything yet.
Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make an arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully.
Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That’s just what artists lack!
God sends us pieces of art so that we may see ourselves in them.
We must not judge God from this world. It’s just a study that didn’t come off. It’s only a master who could make such a blunder.
It is the painting that makes me so happy these days.
There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!
As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.