“[I]t seemed that like me, you suffered to see your youth going up in — smoke — but if it comes back and appears in what we do, there’s nothing lost, and the power to work is a second youth.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“I feel so strongly that the story of people is like the story of wheat, if one isn’t sown in the earth to germinate there, what does it matter, one is milled in order to become bread.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“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)
“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)
“[S]hould one not have patience, not learn patience from nature, learn patience from seeing the wheat slowly come up, the growing of things — should one think oneself such a hugely dead thing that one believed one wouldn’t grow? Should one deliberately discourage one’s development?”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1883)
“Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure, a perspective in the manner of Van Goyen, above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“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)
“I’d very much like to see Millet reproductions in schools, I think there would be children who became painters if only they saw good things.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“And energy generates energy, and conversely paralysis paralyzes others.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“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)
“I myself am very far from satisfied with this but, well, getting better must come through doing it and through trying.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
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.
Start free to bring these voices into your daily practice.