How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?
Vincent Van GoghRead
Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
Interpretation
Van Gogh admires Shakespeare's beauty and complexity, emphasizing the importance of learning to appreciate art and life.
In this quote, Vincent Van Gogh expresses his profound admiration for the works of Shakespeare, likening the beauty of Shakespeare's language to a brush full of excitement and creativity. He suggests that just as one needs to learn to read and understand literature, one must also learn to perceive the world and live life fully, highlighting the intertwined nature of art, perception, and existence.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of arts education, this quote can highlight Van Gogh's perspective on reading and understanding literature.
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 – 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.
My theater has always been a political battle on the stage.
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.
Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often.
I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.
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