Paul Gauguin

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

— Paul Gauguin

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

— Paul Gauguin

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

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

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.

— Paul Gauguin

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

— Paul Gauguin

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

— Paul Gauguin