Vincent Van Gogh

… it has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of a painting.

Vincent Van Gogh

A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.

Vincent Van Gogh

A likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.

Vincent Van Gogh

A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn’t think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it.

Vincent Van Gogh

Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.

Vincent Van Gogh

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet – the marrying of form and colour.

Vincent Van Gogh

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!!!

Vincent Van Gogh

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

Vincent Van Gogh

An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without the graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor.

Vincent Van Gogh

And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can’t go.

Vincent Van Gogh