Vincent Van Gogh Men Quotations

An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh, he makes men instead of statues.

I feel the need of relations and friendship, of affection, of friendly intercourse.... I cannot miss these things without feeling, as does any other intelligent man, a void and a deep need.

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.

What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man... I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.

Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul.....My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul.

The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too

There are colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other like man and woman.

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals.

I want to get to the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply.

Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.

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.

Conscience is a man's compass.

In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.

And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.

By working hard, old man, I hope to make something good one day. I haven't yet, but I am pursuing it and fighting for it . . . .

Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

I am always in the hope to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors - colors which marry each other... complement each other as a man and a woman do.

I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.

I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.

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.

To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.

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.