Quotes by Dutch Authors - Page 2

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.
Audrey Hepburn
Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
Vincent van Gogh
Parts of you are phobic of anger and generally terrified and ashamed of angry dissociative parts. There is often tremendous conflict between anger-avoidant and anger-fixated parts of an individual. Thus, an internal and perpetual cycle of rage-shame-fear creates inner chaos and pain.
Suzette Boon
The golden ratio, as well as the Great Pyramid as an expression of it, is an important key to our universe containing the Earth and the Moon. ... The ratio between the Earth and the Moon is in fact the basis for the mathematical concept of 'squaring the circle' ...
Willem Witteveen
Thinking about something is the surest way to miss out on the beauty of that actual something.
Bentinho Massaro
...even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.
Joseph O'Neill
What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
Vincent van Gogh
...marriage is foremost a vocation. Two people are called together to fulfill a mission that God has given them. Marriage is a spiritual reality. That is to say, a man and a woman come together for life, not just because they experience deep love for each other, but because they believe that God loves each of them with an infinite love and has called them to each other to be living witnesses of that love. To love is to embody God's infinite love in a faithful communion with another human being.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself
Joost A.M. Meerloo
The sound of natural things was wonderful to us. In the middle of all the suffering, it seemed pure, untouched.
Diet Eman
Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?
Corrie ten Boom
I had great pity on Ansje, because she always acted very happy, but I believed that it was really a front. I could see through it. Inside she was crying because she was really very sad. You pity people like that -- the ones who try to lie to themselves -- because they suffer so much and don't face reality.
Diet Eman
And yet it's there, we witnessed it being lit. And fires once lit have to burn until they spend themselves or someone extinguishes them,” Anaxantis said, with some deep regret coating his voice.
Andrew Ashling
Do not weep do not wax indignant. Understand.
Baruch Spinoza
We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.
Frans Kellendonk
No one has ever become poor by giving.
Anne Frank
We are our secrets, and, if all goes well, we will take them with us to where no-one can touch them.
Cees Nooteboom
The worst is, I remain so stone cold. Does this war make you an 'alive-dead person'? Is it not possible to remain yourself in this chaos? How long still?
Diet Eman
On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose," (pp. 49).
Henri J.M. Nouwen
When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.
Baruch Spinoza
As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
The various worms eat one's body after its death; conversely, cancer cells eat one's body, when it breathes, since the failure of medical research.
Ehsan Sehgal
What is first seen as a loss is now seen as a gain. For he finds solitude, not in far off, quite places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it around him, wherever he may be, because he loves it and slowly he ripens in this tranquility. For the inner process is beginning to unfold, stillness is extraordinarily important.
Janwillem van de Wetering
When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.
Erasmus
It has struck me that people seldom listen to the meaning of underlying words.There are only a few people who recognize the silence beyond the scream,the gentle weeping that hides beyond tough statements.They hear only the words,the sentences,when there is so much more to take in.People who are too self-absorbed to notice,really see or fathom others.Often,they don't even know themselves.
Esther Verhoef
If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.
Peter Debye
And here I am sitting again, yes, sitting again by this faithful lamp, feeling indescribably serene and unhurried. I shall travel this day's path quite calmly and just take a little holiday—my eyes and head are slightly overstressed and overstrained. One must have the patience to do a little less.
Etty Hillesum
Some dissociative parts of the personality, living in trauma time, may experience the same emotion no matter the situation, such as fear, rage, shame, sadness, yearning and even some positive ones just as joy.
Suzette Boon
Nothing doth worse become a man (I will not say a Christian man) than war.
Erasmus
All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude. Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.Letting our aloneness grow into solitude and not into loneliness is a lifelong struggle. It requires conscious choices about whom to be with, what to study, how to pray, and when we ask for counsel. But wise choices will help us to find the solitude where our hearts can grow in love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke
Vincent van Gogh
The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.
Eddie Van Halen
Our honour is that we make the law to violate and break it, and we stay to do that.
Ehsan Sehgal
Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree.
Frans de Waal
Actually, in its essence, democracy is a totalitarian ideology, though not as extreme as Nazism, fascism or communism. In principle, no freedom is safe in a democracy, every aspect of the individual's life is potentially subject to government control. At the end of the day, the minority is completely at the mercy of the whims of the majority. Even if a democracy has a constitution limiting the powers of the government, this constitution too can be amended by the majority. The only fundamental right you have in a democracy, besides running for office, is the right to vote for a political party. With that solitary vote you hand over your independence and your freedom to the will of the majority.
Frank Karsten
I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person.
Audrey Hepburn
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life, the power to create.
Vincent van Gogh
What does it mean to be an 'open source' society? What does one mean when one says one has an 'open mind'? Open source means that its a society everybody can work on improving. It has a synergy that allows the best minds to float on top, since there is no entropical hierarchy of mediocrity - once everything stays fluid there is the odd chance for genius elements to actually lead. Such is the case now in Turkey. The protesters are a fluid synergy that have no entropical leadership, and thus the most brilliant PR moves are made by the resistance, who are opposed by the worst sort of mediocrity that is totally at odds with reality. An 'open mind' follows a similar process, but in this case the entropy hides in the hierarchy of ideas that is implanted in the brain: once a person follows mediocre ideas - such as the 'idea' that 'marriage is the meaning of life' or 'having a job is the purpose of existence' etc - then the phenomenon of the 'open mind' becomes already impossible, for there is an internal hierarchy of entropy present that will prevent any sort of original impulse to have the meaning it truly has. Hence, the only way to escape the mediocrity of ones own mind is to allow anything to build and revise it.
Martijn Benders
Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move.To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
It's making me so sad that you are unreachable. My desire for your touch, and your lips. It's breaking me inside. I'm so scared you are the only one i will ever love. I'm so scared because I know there is no other you.
Salomé Steinz
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it
Henri J.M. Nouwen
For this is love's truth; she joins two in one being, makes sweet sour, strangers neighbors, and the lowly noble.
Hadewijch
Ik vind het doodzonde van mijn tijd om me te verdiepen in de organische geesteswoekeringen van een dichter die me niets beters te melden heeft dan het niets, de leegte, het onverstaanbare. Het onverstaanbare heb ik thuis ook, als ik door de WC-deur heen probeer te praten met mijn vriendin. Het onzegbare, dat roeren wij thuis door de muesli. Ik wil poëzie die me meeneemt naar een wereld die ik nog niet ken, naar een inzicht dat ik nog niet had, naar een uitzicht dat ik nergens anders had kunnen vinden. Ik wil een gedicht dat zo goed is, dat ik bijna vergeet dat het, zoals elk gedicht, een taalbouwsel is – een volmaakt bedrieglijke travestie waar het grote niets doorheen schijnt, een van zijn eigen leugenachtigheid getuigende leugen van inkt. Ik wil een gedicht als een huis, dat me op één steen na laat geloven dat ik er werkelijk in zou kunnen wonen.
Ingmar Heytze
If you accept others as equals, you embrace them unconditionally, now and forever. But if you let them know that you tolerate them, you suggest in the same breath that they are actually an inconvenience, like a nagging pain or an unpleasant odour you are willing to disregard.
Arthur Japin
The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed."By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it.""And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.
Charles de Lint
Dav­el­lon may be a vil­lage, but the Dav­el­lon House can be any­thing you make it. No­bil­ity has to start some­where. It might as well start with you. Let no­body look down on you, for what­ever rea­son, My Lord. Ti­tles are granted or in­her­ited, no­bil­ity isn't.~Tenaxos I to Landar Parmingh, Baron Davellon
Andrew Ashling
That's the positive aspect of trade I suppose. The world gets stirred up together. That's about as much as I have to say for it.
Isabel Hoving
Riches can all be lost, but that happiness in your own heart can only be veiled, and it will bring you happiness again, as long as you live.
Anne Frank
Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.
Cees Nooteboom
Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.
Rob Riemen
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
Johan Huizinga
From the heart arise unknowable impulses as well as conscious feelings, moods, and wishes. The heart, too, has its reasons and is the center of perception and understanding. Finally, the heart is the seat of the will: it makes plans and comes to good decisions. Thus the heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life. Our heart determines our personality, and is therefore not only the place where God dwells but also the place to which Satan directs his fiercest attacks. It is this heart that is the place of prayer. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that directs itself to God from the center of the person and thus affects the whole of our humanness.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Jesus himself entered into this furnace. There he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant ('turn stones into loaves'), to be spectacular ('throw yourself down'), and to be powerful ('I will give you all these kingdoms'). There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity ('You must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone'). Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter - the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
He who has a choice has trouble.
Dutch proverb
Every person should embrace those [dogmas] that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do most to strengthen in him love of justice.
Baruch Spinoza
If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that's quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Memories remain a part of one's life, whether that arise, and pass in a bitter or a sweet way.
Ehsan Sehgal
There's only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and foget everybody else! It sound egotistical, but it's actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity.
Anne Frank
through prayer we can reach into the future and with loving hands touch those beyond our reach.
Brother Andrew