Great Things Are Done By A

From Letter 274, written from The Hague on 22 October 1882 to his brother Theo, the full phrasing reads "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." Van Gogh wrote it while planning an ambitious lithography project depicting working-class figures — sowers, diggers, woodcutters — believing that artistic significance was built through sustained, incremental effort rather than single strokes of inspiration.