Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.
What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
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, but I’ll always remain half crazy.
The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.
I’ve just kept on ceaselessly painting in order to learn painting.
For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.
I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.
It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.
Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.
But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.
But for one’s health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.
I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
There is no blue without yellow and without orange.
Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures.