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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
AffectionFriendshipLoveLiberationLife
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on the importance of community, one might quote Van Gogh to emphasize the power of human connection.
More from Vincent Van Gogh
All quotes →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.
Vincent Van GoghRead
To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.
Vincent Van GoghRead
Great things do not just happen by impulse, _x000D_ but as a succession of small things linked together.
Vincent Van GoghRead
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.
Vincent Van GoghRead
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.
Vincent Van GoghRead
Similar quotes
If we are to prosper together in our increasingly small world, we must listen to -- and learn from each other's stories
Queen Noor Of JordanRead
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.
Virginia WoolfRead
If you're going to be a Christian, you're going to change. You're going to lose some old friends, not because you want to, but because you need to.
Johnny CashRead
S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.
Marilyn FrenchRead
I'm not as angry as I used to be. But I can get in touch with that anger pretty quickly if I feel my space is being invaded or somebody is not treating me with the respect that I think I want.
Samuel L. JacksonRead