Paul Gauguin Quotations

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes that he has got the biggest piece.

In marriage, the greater cuckold of the two is the lover

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!

Civilization is paralysis.

No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!

A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.

In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.

I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.

Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised.

It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.

Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow...

Perhaps I have no talent, but all vanity aside - I do not believe that anyone makes an artistic attempt, no matter how small, without having a little - or there are many fools.

Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.

The critics can say stupid things and we can enjoy them, if we have the legitimate feeling of superiority - the satisfaction of a duty accomplished.

Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.

Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.

In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?

The single most powerful tool for winning a negotiation is the ability to get up and walk away from the table without a deal

How do you see those tree?... They are yellow. Well then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

is either plagiarism or revolution.

Proficiency in art is a contract with your self and the empowerment of your self. Not all of us demand or even desire proficiency, but for those who do it's necessary to temper the influence of groups. And while some artists think history is bunk, the historical evidence is overwhelming: "In my isolation I grow stronger."

Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.

Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.

Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.

I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.

Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist.

Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene.

All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent...When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion?

The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.

However depressed I may be I am not in the habit of giving up a project without having tried everything, even the 'impossible', to gain my end.

Slyly, banteringly, but also overbearingly, the critic - the one who does not swallow anything whole, who waits until posterity has consecrated it before... howling - is among those who howl their admiration the way they howl their insults: don't be afraid, don't tremble - the beast doesn't have any nails or teeth, or even brain: it is stuffed...

Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool...

A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

Why did I hesitate to put all this glory of the sun on my canvas?

The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain...

Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.

Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?

Night is here. All is at rest. My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before men infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Civilization is what makes you sick.

Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.

Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor - rather, to love him.

When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because I am that I have endured such sufferings.

In art one is concerned with the condition of the spirit for three quarters of the time; one must therefore care for oneself if he wishes to make something great and lasting.

But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.

A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.

Beautiful colors exist, though we do not realize it, and are glimpsed behind the veil that modesty has drawn over them.

The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.

If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.

A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.

Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.

A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!...

I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer.

Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

The work of a man is the explanation of the man.

Having the certitude of a succession of days... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.

With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

There are tonalities which are noble and others which are vulgar, harmonies which are calm or consoling, and others which are exciting because of their boldness.

Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature.

There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.

In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.

My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist!

I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.

Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!

Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy antique beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature.

Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows...

Lacking many of the essential implements, it irritated me to be reduced to impotence in the face of artistic projects to which I had passionately given myself.

If instead of a figure you put the shadow only of a person, you have found an original starting point, that strangeness of which you have calculated.

I am entering into the truth, into nature.

In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

I was aware that on my skill as a painter would depend the physical and moral possession of the model...

How to re-light the fire the very ashes of which are scattered?

If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I'd rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!

A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.

Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.