There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

The sadness will last forever.

Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.

Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death be like autumn leaves. Rabindranath Tagore What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.

Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

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

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.

As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.

Keep going, keep going come what may.

Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength ... .

I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.

La tristesse durera toujours.
[The sadness will last forever.]

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

Art demands constant observation.

Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That's just what artists lack!

One should arrive at leading one's conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.