Quotes from Vincent Van Gogh

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

I feel the need of relations and friendship, of affection, of friendly intercourse.... I cannot miss these things without feeling, as does any other intelligent man, a void and a deep need.

I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.

You have first to experience what you want to express.

If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere.

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

Everywhere we look, complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

One can never study nature too much and too hard

The worse I get along with people the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her.

Here everything is so wholly what I consider beautiful. In other words, there is peace here.

One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music.

The wheat field has ...poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen. We can only make our pictures speak.

We are surrounded by poetry on all sides.

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

What is done in love is done well.

Great things are not something accidental but must certainly be willed.

I am a fanatic! I feel a power within me...a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.

Yellow is capable of charming God.

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it.

To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, who with irresistible force urges us towards more loving.

I believe more and more that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of His sketches that has turned out badly.

To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.

So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.