“If something in you yourself says ‘you aren’t a painter’ — IT’S THEN THAT YOU SHOULD PAINT, old chap, and that voice will be silenced too, but precisely because of that.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1883)
“It is no easier, I’m convinced, to make a good painting than to find a diamond or a pearl; it requires effort, and you stake your life as a dealer or an artist on it.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“But if one wants to grow, one must fall into the earth. So I say to you, plant yourself in the soil of Drenthe — you will sprout there. Don’t shrivel up on the pavement. You’ll say that there are city plants — well yes, but you are wheat and belong in the wheatfield.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1883)
“And energy generates energy, and conversely paralysis paralyzes others.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“Live — do something — and that’s more enjoyable, that’s more positive.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1883)
“You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“And it does me good to do what’s difficult. That doesn’t stop me having a tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion — so I go outside at night to paint the stars, and I always dream a painting like that, with a group of lively figures of the pals.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“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.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1880)
“Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“But doing something endures — and one doesn’t easily regret having done something. The more active the better, and I’d rather fail than sit idle.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1885)
“So instead of giving way to despair, I took the way of active melancholy as long as I had strength for activity, or in other words, I preferred the melancholy that hopes and aspires and searches to the one that despairs, mournful and stagnant.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1880)
“[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)
The Salon library
This is today’s sample of twelve. The whole collection is in the Salon.
Salon members read all 746 English quotes and the Afrikaans collection too, with every filter,
the plain-words notes from A Year with the Muses, the quotes they save, and a private journal for the lines that stay with them.
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Every quote in this collection was verified
against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it
truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
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