No, no thought to the winnings. One loves because one loves.
Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don’t know anything.
Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.
Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.
Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground – yet that ground is very dark...
To die for the sake of dying – I prefer to die of passion than to die of boredom!
To the one party, woman is always heresy and diabolical. To me, the opposite.
Do not think too deeply about these things – gradually they will become clearer to you.
But after all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gap.
Whatever plan one makes, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere.
Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.
If one keeps loving faithfully what is really worth loving, and does not waste one’s love on insignificant and unworthy and meaningless things, one will get more light by and by and grow stronger.
I consciously choose the dog’s path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter...
Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares-and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t.’
I always dream a painting like that, with a group of lively figures of the pals.
I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.
I felt my energy return and that I said to myself, in any event I’ll recover from it, I’ll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I’ll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me.
I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we didn’t dare to take things in hand?
Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man’s soul.
That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn’t alter the fact that I’m bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!