Love Quote by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh turns theology sideways here: God isn’t an abstract puzzle to solve, but a presence you bump into through appetite - for color, for people, for wheatfields, for the harsh mercy of daylight. It’s a line that quietly rejects the pious idea that holiness requires narrowing your life into one sanctioned devotion. For him, the divine is not secured by purity tests; it’s approached by expanding your capacity to care.

The subtext is almost a self-defense. Van Gogh was forever being judged: too intense, too unstable, too poor, too wrong for polite society and for the institutions that claimed spiritual authority. He’d tried formal religion (even preaching) and found it inadequate to the scale of his feeling. So he proposes an alternative route: love as practice, not doctrine. “Many things” matters - plural, messy, worldly. It’s an ethic of attention that dignifies ordinary objects and working people, the very subjects he painted with near-religious seriousness.

Context sharpens the stakes. In the late 19th century, modernity was fraying old certainties; industrial life and bourgeois morality were tightening their grip. Van Gogh answers with a kind of radical tenderness: if you want God, don’t withdraw from the world; risk attachment to it. There’s tragedy baked in too. Loving many things is generous, but it’s also a recipe for hurt when you’re that porous. The sentence reads like a credo for his art: brushwork as prayer, obsession as a form of faith.