How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?
Vincent Van GoghRead
Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.
Interpretation
Genuine affection and love have the power to free us from emotional prisons and revive our spirits.
Vincent Van Gogh suggests that the deep connections we form through friendship and love can liberate us from feelings of isolation and despair. He emphasizes the transformative power of these relationships, stating that without them, we remain spiritually dead, but with affection, we find a resurgence of life and vitality.
In practice
During a speech on the importance of community, one might quote Van Gogh to emphasize the power of human connection.
How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?
Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.
To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.
Great things do not just happen by impulse, _x000D_ but as a succession of small things linked together.
The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings β not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.
To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, who with irresistible force urges us towards more loving.
When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.
Marriage is like a temple resting on two pillars. If they come too close to each other the temple will collapse.
My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.
I think that everyone should get married at least once, so you can see what a silly, outdated institution it is.
Our country has a painful history of mistrust between police departments and people of color. The overuse of stop-and-frisk has made those divisions much worse.
Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.