Status Updates From Van Gogh 1853-1890

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‘La tristesse durera toujours’
The sadness will last forever.

“They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness. I hope you will see them soon, since I almost think that these canvasses will tell you what I cannot say in words, the health and restorative forces that I see in the country.”

“My dear friend, to achieve in painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has already done ... an art that offers consolation for the broken-hearted.”

“And mind my dear fellows, Paris is Paris. There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even – the French air clears up the brain and does you good – a world of good.”

“For what’s the use of a beautiful body? Animals have it too, perhaps even more than men; but the soul, as it lives in the people painted by Israëls or Millet or Frère, that is what animals never have. Is not life given to us to become richer in spirit, even though the outward appearance may suffer?”

“I should like to be with a woman for a change, I cannot live without love, without a woman”

Several days before his suicide, he summed up his lifelong failure to find a satisfying intimacy in the following enigmatic remark:

“As through a looking glass, by a dark reason – so it has remained.”