Love Quote by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh doesn’t offer piety here; he offers a practice. “Know God” is framed less as doctrine than as perception, and the doorway isn’t prayer but appetite: love, multiplied. For an artist who trained his eye on wheat fields, worn boots, café light, and the hard geometry of faces, the line reads like a manifesto against religious austerity. God isn’t approached by narrowing the world into purity tests; God is approached by widening your capacity to be moved.

The subtext is quietly defiant. Van Gogh lived with faith as both inheritance and injury: raised in a Protestant culture, briefly attempting a life of ministry, then turning toward painting as his real vocation. This sentence rehabilitates devotion after disillusionment. If institutional religion can feel like a closed room, “love many things” throws the windows open. It suggests a God encountered through attention: tenderness toward ordinary objects, empathy toward people who are easy to overlook, reverence for color and weather and labor.

It also doubles as a survival tactic. Van Gogh’s life was marked by isolation and mental turbulence; loving “many things” is a way to distribute hope so it doesn’t collapse when one relationship, one belief, one outcome fails. The line works because it smuggles theology into aesthetics: beauty and care become moral acts. Knowing God isn’t an argument you win; it’s a sensitivity you build, brushstroke by brushstroke, affection by affection.