What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.
A woman is not old as long as she loves and is loved.
Yellow is capable of charming God.
The sunflower is mine, in a way.
It’s better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.
Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.
It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn’t easy to paint oneself either.
The laws of color are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.
Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.
The lamps are burning and the starry sky is over it all.
Benjamin Murphy is the best artist since sliced bread.
To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life.
It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation – of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things – the thought of God comes into one’s mind.
I wish they would take me as I am.
It seems to me it’s a painter’s duty to try to put an idea into his work.
I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.
If I were to think of and dwell on disastrous possibilities, I could do nothing. I throw myself headlong into my work, and come up again with my studies.
To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not something that actually exists?
To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.