It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is be… - Vincent van Gogh

...to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

is too high up in the air for my taste, too little on solid ground. And, after all, art itself is solid enough, that isn’t the trouble. But being a counting house is a passing thing, “être un comptoir cela passe,” is not a phrase of my own but of somebody whose sayings have come terribly true. I wish you were or would become a painter. I say this straight out, more emphatically than before, because I really believe that the great art-dealing business is in many respects a speculation like the bulb trade was. And the situations in it, dependent on chance and freaks of fortune.

So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress.