Close friends are truly life’s treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.
I will not live without love.
Art is to console those who are broken by life.
If you don’t have a dog – at least one – there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life.
One must work and dare if one really wants to live.
I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made...
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.
One must seize the reality of one’s fate and that’s that.
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.
The way to know life is to love many things.
Love makes one calmer about things, and that way, one is fit for one’s work.
Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you’re put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.
Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us – a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!
If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.
I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing.
So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.
Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
I have walked the earth for thirty years and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.