To: Theo, From: Van Gogh

"I think that everything that is really good and beautiful. of inward moral, spiritual, and sublime beauty in men and their works, somes from God, and that all that is bad and wrong in men and in their works is not of God, and God does not approve of it. But I always think the the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more. That leads to God; that leads to unwavering faith."

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"To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God. One man has written or told it in a book, another in a picture. Well, think much and think all the time; that unconsciously raises your throughts above the ordinary level. We know how to read-well, let us read then!"

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"If now you can forgive a man for making a thorough study of pictures, admit also that the love of books is as sacred as the love of Rembrandt, and I think even the two complete each other. I am very fond of the portrait of a man by Fabritius, which one day we stood looking at a long while in the museum of Haarlem. Yes, but I am as fond of Sydney Carton, in the 'Tale of Two Cities' ny Dickens. My God, how beautiful Shakespeare is! Who is mysterious like him? His language and style can indeed be compared to an artist's brush, quivering with fever and emotion. But one must learn to read, as well as one must learn to see and learn to live.

So you must not think that I disavow things; I am rather faithful in my unfaithfulness, and, though changed, I am the same, and my only anxiety is: How can I be of use in the world? Cannot I not serve some purpose and be of any good? How can I learn more? You see, these things preoccupy me constantly, and then I feel myslef imprisoned by poverty, excluded from participating in certain work, and certain necessary things are beyond my reach. That is one reason for not being without melancholy, and then one feels an emptiness where there might be friendship and strong and serious affections; one feels a terrible discouragement gnawing at one's very moral energy; fate seems to put a barrier to the instincts of affection, and a flood of disgust rises to choke one. And one exclaims, 'How long, my God!'

Well, what shall I say? Our inward thoughts, do they ever show outwardly? There may be a great fire in our soul, and no one ever comes to warm himself at it; the passers-by see only a little bit of smoke coming through the chimney, and pass on their way. Now, look you, what must be done? Must one tend that inward fire, have salt in oneself, wait patiently yet with how much impatience for the hour when somebody will come and sit down near it-to stay there maybe?"

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"I should be very glad if you could see in me something besides an idle fellow. Because there are two kinds of idleness that form a great contrast. There is the man who is idle from laziness and from lack of character, from the baseness of his nature. You may if you like take me for such a one. Then there is the other idle man, who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, because he seems to be imprisoned in some cage. A just or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, fatal circumstances, adversity-they are what makes men prisoners. And the prison is also called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, distrust, false shame. One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but nevertheless, one feels certain barriers, certain walls. Such a man does not always know what he can do, but he feels by instinct: Yes, I am good for something; my life has an aim after all; I know that I might be quite a different man! There is something inside of me; what can it be?

Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored."

~ excerpts from Borinage, December, 1878 - Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh