"A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke."

"Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion."

"Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum."

"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures."

"I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it."

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."

"An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men."

"I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."

"The way to know life is to love many things."

"It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours but the art of words exists too and will never be less important."

"Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it."

"Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets " neither of us have any."

"One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it."

"In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true."

"In would rather die of passion than of boredom."

"The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too."

"Whoever loves much, performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well."

"Where friendship blooms, life is reborn."

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

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

"Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion."

"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."

"If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning."

"There are often beams in our eye that we know not of. Let us therefore ask that our eye may become single, for then we ourselves shall become wholly single."

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

"Love is eternal -- the aspect may change, but not the essence. There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work."

"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing."

"One must work and dare if one really wants to live."

"Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous."

"I dream my painting and I paint my dream."