Morning, July 6, 1800.
MY ANGEL! MY ALL! MY SECOND SELF!
Only a few words to-day, written with a pencil (your own). My residence cannot be settled till to-morrow. What a tiresome loss of time! Why this deep grief when necessity compels?–can our love exist without sacrifices, and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter [...]
Heiligenstadt, Oct. 6, 1802.
Oh! ye who think or declare me to be hostile, morose, and misanthropical, how unjust you are, and how little you know the secret cause of what appears thus to you! My heart and mind were ever from childhood prone to the most tender feelings of affection, and I was always disposed [...]
I joyfully hasten to meet Death. If he comes before I have had the opportunity of developing all my artistic powers, then, notwithstanding my cruel fate, he will come too early for me, and I should wish for him at a more distant period; but even then I shall be content, for his advent will [...]
God looks into my heart, He searches it, and knows that love for man and feelings of benevolence have their abode there! Oh! ye who may one day read this, think that you have done me injustice, and let any one similarly afflicted be consoled, by finding one like himself, who, in defiance of all [...]
What humiliation when any one beside me heard a flute in the far distance, while I heard nothing, or when others heard a shepherd singing, and I still heard nothing! Such things brought me to the verge of desperation, and wellnigh caused me to put an end to my life. Art! art alone, deterred me. [...]
Born with a passionate and excitable temperament, keenly susceptible to the pleasures of society, I was yet obliged early in life to isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude. If I at any time resolved to surmount all this, oh! how cruelly was I again repelled by the experience, sadder than ever, of [...]
Self-actualizing people live their lives detached from the outcome. And detached from the outcome means I don’t do what I do because of what might show up for me. I’m not motivated by being famous; I’m not motivated by making money; I’m not motivated by other people’s approval. I’m motivated by doing what I love [...]
I understand the vocation of the intellectual as trying to turn easy answers into critical questions and putting those critical questions to people with power. The quest for truth, the quest for the good, the quest for the beautiful all require us to let suffering speak, let victims be visible and social misery be put [...]
This is what had happened: Van Gogh went back to the house and immediately cut off his ear, very close to his head. It must have taken him some time to stanch the flow of blood, for next day a number of wet towels lay on the stone floor of the two ground-floor rooms. The [...]
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a main era – -the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. [...]
