Quotes from Vincent Van Gogh

I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed. I want - to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds and to feel these bonds. To be sorrowful yet always rejoicing. To live in and for Christ, to be one of the poor in His kingdom, steeped in the leaven, filled with His spirit, impelled by His Love, reposing in the Father with the repose of which I wrote to you in my last letter.

To do that well, one must have the Gospel in one's heart; may He grant that. God says, Let there be light! And there is light. He speaks and it is there. He commands and there it stands and stands firm. He who calls us, is faithful, and shall accomplish it.

It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after. A work that is good may not last for ever, but the thought expressed by it will, and the work itself will surely survive for a very long time, and those who come later can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and copy their example.

The clergymen call us sinners, conceived and born in sin. Bah! What confounded nonsense that is. Is it a sin to love, to feel the need for love, not to be able to live without love? I consider a life without love a sinful and immoral state.

I, for my part, am always glad that I have read the Bible more carefully than many people do nowadays, just because it gives me some peace of mind to know that there used to be such lofty ideals.

And yet I go on; if we are tired isn't it then because we have already walked a long way, and if it is true that man has his battle to fight on earth, is not then the feeling of weariness and the burning of the head a sign that we have been struggling? When we are working at a difficult task and strive after a good thing we fight a righteous battle, the direct reward of which is that we are kept from much evil.

oy where did my ear go?

Admire as much as you can; most people do not admire enough.

So I have a horror of success.

Everything on earth changes - we have no abiding city here - it is the experience of everybody. That it is God's will that we should part with what is dearest on earth - we ourselves change in many respects, we are not what we once were, we shall not remain what we are now.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

But I myself do not think I cannot make mistakes - I am too conscious of my many errors to be able to say this or that is the right manner and this or that, the wrong one. That goes without saying. But I am not indifferent, I think it wrong to be so. I think it one's duty to try to do the right thing, even knowing that one cannot go through life without making mistakes, without regret or sorrow. Somewhere I read, Some good must come by clinging to the right.