Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.
But on the road that I'm on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don't study, if I don't keep on trying, then I'm lost, then woe betide me. That's how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that's what's needed.
We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder.
One can never study nature too much and too hard
Study, analyse the social structure - that's always far more effective than moralising.
That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter.
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.