Vincent van Gogh

The sadness will last forever.

I am not mad, I am not mad, I am not mad.

It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent.

I want to paint the air as well as the objects.

I am trying to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.

The potato eaters, you see, I really have tried to make it clear that these people eating their potatoes in the lamplight have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour and how they have honestly earned their food.

Colour expresses something in itself.

I have an almost irresistible longing to go to the south, to see another sun, to see a different light.

I am not an artist, I am a worker.

Just as we take the good with the bad, so we must take the beautiful with the ugly.

I dream my painting and I paint my dream.

Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.

What am I in the eyes of most people — a negligible little man or an insane person?

I am not strict. In art, one cannot be strict; it is invention, it is discovery.

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never ordered their lives to avoid it.

Conscience is a man's compass.

One must work and dare if one really wants to be a painter.

I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

The best way to know God is to love many things.