Vincent Van Gogh

We sometimes feel rather lonely and long for friends, and think we’d be quite different and happier if only we found ‘it’, a friend of whom we would say, ‘this is it’.

Just seek light and freedom and don’t delve too deeply into the mire of the world.

Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better. Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.

How I’d like to talk to you about art again, but now we can only write to each other about it often; find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.

May one, must one, can one involve others whom one needs, without whom one can’t carry it out, and drag them into an affair of which it’s doubtful whether it will be profitable?

One must cool-headedly keep one hand on the tiller to continue the work, and with the other hand try to ensure that one does no harm to others.

One wants to be an honest man, and one is, one works just as hard as a porter, and yet one falls short, one has to give the work up, one sees no chance of carrying it out without spending more on it than one will get back for it. One has a feeling of guilt, of falling short, of not keeping promises, one isn’t honest as one would be if the work was paid for at its natural, fair price.

Now, to stomach that despondency and melancholy as one is, to be patient with oneself, not to take a rest but to toil despite a thousand shortcomings and faults and the precariousness of the victory — that’s why a painter is also not happy: the battle with himself, improving himself, renewing his energy. All this complicated by the material difficulties.

I myself am very far from satisfied with this but, well, getting better must come through doing it and through trying. It seems to me that a painter has a duty to try to put an idea into his work.

I just said, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I fear, Theo, that it will come about that many who have sacrificed the old for the sake of the new will deeply regret it. Especially in the realm of art.

The more menus and decorations for festive occasions you make, even if they’re pleasing and good, the less you’ll be able to remain in agreement with your artistic conscience. The more you stay with the serious toil of institute for the blind, tile painters, knitters &c., the more you’ll feel that such toil has its raison d’être, even if one has no immediate success.

The present has something hectic and harried about it for which I do not care, and it’s just as if death has touched everything. I’d like your expectation ‘that the desired change will come’ to prove true, but in my view it isn’t ‘in the nature of things’.

Might not the cause of this also lie in the lives and characters of the artists? I don’t know what your experience is, but do you find many people these days prepared to go for a long walk in grey weather, for example? You would do it gladly, and enjoy it too, as I would, but for many it would be a chore. Equally, I was struck by the fact that when one talks to painters, in most cases, by far, the conversation is not interesting.

Two things that remain eternally true and complement each other, in my view are: don’t snuff out your inspiration and power of imagination, don’t become a slave to the model; and, the other, take a model and study it, for otherwise your inspiration won’t take on material form.

Dickens has some nice things to say about the painters of his age and their wrong way of working, namely slavishly and yet only half sticking to the model. He says: Fellows, do understand that your model isn’t your ultimate goal but a means for giving body and vigour to your ideas and inspiration.

Naturally, while working one always feels and ought to feel a sort of dissatisfaction with oneself, a desire to be able to do it much better, but still it’s delightful and enjoyable to gradually assemble all kinds of figures — although the more one makes, the more one realizes one needs.

That — namely, talking — isn’t what one needs to do — one must work, though with sorrow in the heart. Those who later cry out the loudest about decadence will themselves belong to it the most. I repeat: by this shall ye know them,6 by their work, and it won’t be the most eloquent who say the truest things.