Vincent van Gogh

I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.

Occasionally, in times of worry, I've longed to be stylish, but on second thought I say no—just let me be myself—and express rough, yet true things with rough workmanship.

I've never felt a desire (and I don't believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work... a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.

It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.

I would sooner paint people's eyes than cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is lacking in a cathedral - however solemn and impressive it may be.

For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.

At present this horror of life is already less pronounced, and the melancholy less acute. But I still have no will, and hardly any desires, or none at all that are to do with ordinary life.

I mercilessly destroyed an important canvas—a Christ with the angel in Gethsemane—as well as…

I want to do figures, figures and more figures, it's stronger than me, this series of bipeds from the baby to Socrates and from the black-haired woman with white skin to the woman with yellow hair and a sunburnt face the color of brick.

Next, I'm attempting to do dusty thistles with a great swarm of butterflies swirling above them.

I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don't invent the whole of the painting; on the contrary, I find it readymade—but to be untangled—in the real world.

I hardly have a head for writing, but I feel a great emptiness in no longer being at all up to date with what Gauguin, you and others are doing. But I really must have patience....

What moulting is to birds, the time when they change their feathers, that's adversity or misfortune, hard times, for us human beings. 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.

So don't study and swot too much, because that makes for sterility. Enjoy yourself too much rather than too little, and don't take art or love too seriously either — one can do little about it oneself, it's mostly a matter of temperament.

Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil.

Believe me that sometimes I laugh heartily because people suspect me of all kinds of malignity and absurdity, of which not a hair of my head is guilty — I, who am really no one but a friend of nature, of study, of work, and especially of people.

Well, well, after all there are so many painters who are cracked in one way or another that little by little I shall be reconciled to it. I understand...

He understands, that goes without saying, that he has had a bout of insanity and this thought grieves and revolts him at the same time.