Love Quote by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh isn’t romanticizing love as a soft-focus virtue; he’s pitching it as a work ethic. The line reads like a private survival manual from someone who knew how easily the world can starve you of momentum. “Love many things” is practical advice for an artist whose life was defined by instability: if you tether your purpose to one person, one patron, one lucky break, you’re doomed. Spread the attachments. Build a wider net of fascination - with ordinary people, landscapes, colors, books, God, bread, boots. That plural “many” is the whole strategy.

The subtext is a rebuke to the era’s idea of genius as aloof detachment. Van Gogh insists that intensity is not a distraction from craft; it’s the fuel. “Performs much” and “accomplish much” deliberately drag love out of the sentimental register and into the realm of output, repetition, and sweat. He’s arguing against the myth that suffering alone produces great art. Suffering may be unavoidable, but love is the thing that makes you show up again.

Context matters: this comes from a man who lived on the edge of poverty and rejection, writing letters that often sounded like he was trying to talk himself back from the cliff. The last clause - “what is done in love is done well” - is less Hallmark than calibration. It’s a quality control metric: the work made with real attention, real tenderness toward the subject, carries a different charge. Van Gogh is telling you how to make a life, not just a painting: choose devotion as your engine, or risk being swallowed by emptiness.