“What a dreadful person you are”

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Cuesmes, July 1880

But, you will say, what a dreadful person you are, with your impossible religious notions and idiotic scruples. If my ideas are impossible or idiotic then I would like nothing better than to be rid of them. . . .

I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God, and everything that is bad and evil in the works of men and in men is not from God, and God does not approve of it.

Letter 133
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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