Paul Gauguin Quotes (19 Quotes)

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

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

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

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

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

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.

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

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

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.

Civilization is what makes you sick.