Quotes by Dutch Authors - Page 9

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we'd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and co-operation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!”,Our Inner Ape
Frans de Waal
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
Vincent van Gogh
In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.
Marja de Vries
Crying can bring relief, as long as you don't cry alone.
Anne Frank
(regarding what kind of day she would want to be released) If I had the opportunity to choose, I would want it to be a radiant sunshiny day! And I would love it to be a Saturday morning. I'd go home and take a bath and soak and shampoo and put on clean underwear and clean clothes! And then Sunday morning I want to go to church and thank Gd for freedom -- with capital letters.
Diet Eman
Jesus, the Blessed Child of God, is merciful. Showing mercy is different from having pity. Pity connotes distance, even looking down upon. When a beggar asks for money and you give him something out of pity, you are not showing mercy. Mercy comes from a compassionate heart; it comes from a desire to be an equal. Jesus didn’t want to look down on us. He wanted to become one of us and feel deeply with us.When Jesus called the only son of the widow of Nain to life, he did so because he felt the deep sorrow of the grieving mother in his own heart (see Luke 7:11-17). Let us look at Jesus when we want to know how to show mercy to our brothers and sisters.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The church itself is a spiritual director. It tries to connect your story with God's story. Just to be a true part of this community means you are being directed, you are being guided, you are being asked to make connection. The Bible is a spiritual director. People must read Scripture as a word for themselves personally, and ask where God speaks to them. Finally, individual Christians are also spiritual directors. A spiritual director is a Christian man or woman who practices the disciplines of the church and of the Bible and to whom you are willing to be accountable for your life in God.
Henri Nouwen
My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.
Audrey Hepburn
Despite everything, I believe people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
We change with time by how we view the future and reflect the past
Ronnie Cornelisz
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quaran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience of their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am seeking I am striving I am in it with all my heart.
Vincent van Gogh
..it has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of a painting.
Vincent van Gogh
This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.
Anne Frank
Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.
Geert Hofstede
Amo stare da sola : io, i miei libri e i miei pennelli, lontana dal resto della gente che trovo sempre inutile.
Sara Dardikh
The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?" I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, "But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam." Ruud said, "Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful." I walked into the office thinking, "I have to wake these people up."...The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Don’t cry and don’t rage. Understand.
Baruch Spinoza
Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition
Baruch Spinoza
Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.
Charles de Lint
The nature of everything is, fair and based on justice. We make that unfair and unjust.
Ehsan Sehgal
Religion demands above all the concentration of the spirit...it is a thrusting into the unity of all things so as to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with the unity of the One from Whom it all comes.
Abraham Kuyper
An abundance of pictorial fancy, after all, furnished the simple mind quite as much matter for deviating from pure doctrine as any personal interpretation of Holy Scripture.
Johan Huizinga
Aren't you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: 'May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.' But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.
Baruch Spinoza
A mother's lap is the strongest hub and school of each religion. In other words, the mother breezes and waves the religion since she is the religion.
Ehsan Sehgal
As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
Joseph O'Neill
If I get married, I want to be very married.
Audrey Hepburn
We have to fight them daily like fleas those many small worries about the morrow for they sap our energies.
Etty Hillesum
My life is a work of art and nature is my temple!
Maurice Spees
Happy girls are the prettiest
Audrey Hepburn
While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
So she goes to see the Old Man of the Mountains–looks just like you, Bear. Same face, same hair. A big old bear, sitting up there on the top of the mountain, looking out at everything below. Doesn’t smile so much, but understands how everybody’s got a secret dark place sits way deep down there inside, hidden but wanting to get out. Understands how you can be happy but not happy at the same time. Understands that sometimes you feel you got to go all the way out to get back in, but if you do, you can’t. There’s no way back in.
Charles de Lint
Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.
Charles de Lint
To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Great things are not something accidental but must certainly be willed.
Vincent van Gogh
I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, great wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
Anne Frank
People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I didn't want to do it,' Kiala said. 'The universe just kind of conspired to force me to make a fool of myself. It does that quite a lot, actually.
Graham Parke
Overwhelmed by life's complexity? Realize that our alphabet consists of only 26 letters, calculations are based on a set of 10 numbers, all variations in music are based on 7 musical notes, our DNA can be dissected into 4 letters and space on the Planck scale is probably made solely out of binary code
Martijn Budel
Life without risks is like a burrito without Tabasco. Bland, but you’ll still fart.
Martyn V. Halm
And now, when Mother called to wake me up for the New Year, I first wanted to pray, but it turned into thanks, darling, for all that God had given us this year. For his wonderful ways with us, even if we don't understand it all now. For his love, that in all our disappointments and sorrow he himself helps us to bear it all, so that all this turns into a blessing because we feel his nearness and can take up our cross joyfully. And so we may know, and we do experience, that his power is made perfect in our weakness.
Diet Eman
Knowledge is a matter of knowing facts. Wisdom is a matter of understanding and applying principles. A certain amount of knowledge is necessary for wisdom, and without wisdom, knowledge is not only useless, it's dangerous.
Hilda van Stockum
We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.
Vincent van Gogh
She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.
Charles de Lint
Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
A well-known psychologist once said, 'When a child reaches his third birthday, his parents will have given him half of all that they will ever be able to give him in the way of education.
Corrie ten Boom
What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path but not choose to tread upon it?
Hanne Arts
Cinderella proof that a new pair of shoes can change your life.
Noortje de Bijl
I sometimes heard the parents of Michel's playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed "a moment to themselves." The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier. I've always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be.
Herman Koch
Spirituality is a magnet, and the magnet affects iron, not wood or stone. Similarly, faith and devotion are iron, who has that, spirituality touches the believer, not an unbeliever.
Ehsan Sehgal
John has a narrow mind. For him, neither the beauty nor the prosperity of the city of Ephesus is worth a second glance. Ephesus was situated at the end of the Silk Road from China and the caravan route from India which used to pass through the Parthian Empire en route to the West. But the prophet is quite unaware that this particular world exists at all. Even culture means absolutely nothing to him; for example, in 18:22 he rejoices that not only song but also the sound of the flute have disappeared. The world which he knows is limited to the seven churches whose Christianity corresponded with his own; and that in but a single province of the Roman Empire, namely Asia. As to the rest, he is only familiar with the mother church in Jerusalem and the sister church in Rome.John is utterly obsessed by Rome. The fact that this particular metropolis had bestowed both law and peace upon no less than one-half of the world never got through to him at all. He is also quite oblivious of the fact that Rome oppresses nations and exploits slaves. He could not care less about national or social considerations. He abominates the "whore on the seven hills" simply because Rome is persecuting Christians. This is precisely what the Apocalypse is all about: innocent suffering.
Gilles Quispel
Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.
Corrie ten Boom
It is not my ability but my response to God's ability that counts.
Corrie ten Boom
Heavy laden -- that's what I am. Laden with pride, often thinking myself better than others while we have to think the other one better than ourselves. Laden with my own egotism. Laden with all my sins. And when I went to bed last night and thought about everything and wanted to bring all those difficulties to God, I couldn't even find the words!
Diet Eman
I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them.
Baruch Spinoza
For Beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness, and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone
Audrey Hepburn
For it is not we who call God by these names. We do not invent them. On the contrary, if it depended on us, we would be silent about him, try to forget him, and disown all his names. We take no delight in the knowledge of his ways. We tend continually to oppose his names: his independence, sovereignty, righteousness, and love, and resist him in all his perfections. But it is God himself who reveals all his perfections and puts his names on our lips. It is he who gives himself these names and who, despite our opposition, maintains them. It is of little use to us to deny his righteousness: every day he demonstrates this quality in history. And so it is with all his attributes. He brings them out despite us. The final goal of all his ways is that his name will shine out in all his works and be written on everyone’s forehead (Rev. 22:4). For that reason we have no choice but to name him with the many names his revelation furnishes us.
Herman Bavinck
At first sight, joy seems to be connected with being different. When you receive a compliment or win an award, you experience the joy of not being the same as others. You are faster, smarter, more beautiful, and it is that difference that brings you joy. But such joy is very temporary. True joy is hidden where we are the same as other people: fragile and mortal. It is the joy of belonging to the human race. It is the joy of being with others as a friend, a companion, a fellow traveler. This is the joy of Jesus, who is Emmanuel: God-with-us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen