For the great doesn't happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.
What it means
Great work doesn’t come from bursts of inspiration alone. It is built from many small things, done one after another and gathered together.
Van Gogh ties it to will: the people who “get round to living with willpower and reflection” are the ones who “will do something great.”
The context
On Sunday, 22 October 1882, in The Hague, Van Gogh writes to his brother Theo, who supported him, about Theo’s remarks on artists in Paris who lived unconventionally. He says he doesn’t look down on them, and prefers them to “people who make a great show of their principles without making the slightest effort to put them into practice.” Principles, he writes, “are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds.”
Then he turns to his own work. Drawing, he says, is “working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do,” and since “hammering on it doesn’t help at all,” one must “undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.” He adds: “the great isn’t something accidental; it must be willed.”
Why it matters
It’s tempting to wait for the big moment, the burst of motivation or the breakthrough. Van Gogh’s line says the big thing is made of small ones, which means the work can start today, at whatever size you can manage.
His wall image helps too. You can’t break through by hammering; you get through by grinding, a little each day.
About Vincent van Gogh
Dutch painter, 1853–1890
Vincent van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853. He worked for the art dealers Goupil & Cie, spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium, and took up painting in 1881. His younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter.
He was unsuccessful during his lifetime, yet in just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. He is now among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. He died on 29 July 1890, two days after shooting himself.
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from Letter 274, to his brother Theo, The Hague (translated by the Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING), 22 October 1882.
We matched the words against the English translation of letter 274 on the Van Gogh Museum's letters site, which Alfred saved for us because the site loads only with JavaScript; the date and place, "The Hague, Sunday, 22 October 1882", are from the top of that page, as Alfred read them to us. Van Gogh wrote in Dutch; this translation is the museum's own. We last checked this on 9 November 2026.