Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Photography
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.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: The Artist
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.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Art
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed; contemplating it, everyone can create a story at the will of his imagination and.. with a single glance.. have his soul invaded by the most profound recollections; no effort of memory, everything is summed up in one instant. A complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Art
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Philosophy, Art, Philosophers
The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: The Artist
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.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts, Audiences
Civilization is what makes you sick.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Civilization
Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: The Artist
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.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Criticism
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Revenge
I shut my eyes in order to see.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Advice
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.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Lust For, Life
There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Appetite
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.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Evangelism
Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Life, Time, Living
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Stupidity
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.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Art
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Revolution, Artists, Arts, Art
It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
—Paul Gauguin
Topics: Art, Imagination
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Auguste Rodin French Sculptor
- Marcel Proust French Novelist
- Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
- Edgar Degas French Painter
- Gustave Flaubert French Novelist
- Alexis de Tocqueville French Historian, Political Scientist
- Guy de Maupassant French Short-story Writer
- Charles Baudelaire French Poet
- Jean Anouilh French Playwright
- Frantz Fanon Algerian Political Theorist
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