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Acceptance
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I wish they would only take me as I am.
-Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo: Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh
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Adventure
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I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Art
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Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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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.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Artist, The
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Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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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. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Bravery
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What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Color
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There is no blue without yellow and without orange.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Confidence
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If you hear a voice within you saying, You are not a painter, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Conscience
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Conscience is a man's compass.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Dreams
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For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train.
-Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh, July 9, 1888
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Emotions
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But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions?
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Excellence
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If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Goodness
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A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Love
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Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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The best way to know God is to love many things.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic that to love others.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Maturity
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If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Mistakes
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Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
-Vincent Van Gogh
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Reality
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How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.
-Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo, July 1885
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Books by and about Vincent Van Gogh