“You know, what makes the prison disappear is every deep, serious attachment. To be friends, to be brothers, to love; that opens the prison through sovereign power, through a most powerful spell. But he who doesn’t have that remains in death. But where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1880)
“It isn’t the language of painters one ought to listen to but the language of nature.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
“Try to understand the last word of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces; there will be God in it.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1880)
“[I]’d almost believe that these canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1890)
“[M]y own conscience is the compass that shows me the way, although I know that it doesn’t work exactly accurately.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1883)
“I think I’ll spend less here than elsewhere, since here I still have work on my plate, for nature is beautiful.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“[I]mperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.”
— John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (1853)
“In short, I want to reach the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply and that man feels subtly.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
“To express the love of two lovers through a marriage of two complementary colours, their mixture and their contrasts, the mysterious vibrations of adjacent tones. To express the thought of a forehead through the radiance of a light tone on a dark background. To express hope through some star. The ardour of a living being through the rays of a setting sun.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“[Y]et, yet, one feels a power seething inside one, one has a task to do and it must be done.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
“I don’t feel as much need to amuse myself, I’m less at the mercy of my passions and I can work more calmly, I could be alone without being bored. I came out of it feeling a little older, but no sadder.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
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