Quotes by Dutch Authors - Page 11

Don't dream to lead the people while you can't care, even about your neighbours.
Ehsan Sehgal
How true Daddy's words were when he said: all children must look after their own upbringing. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
Anne Frank
The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend.
Anne Frank
Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present, and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.
Audrey Hepburn
If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.
Vincent van Gogh
Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.
Simon Kuper
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
I want friends, not admirers. People who respect me for my character and my deeds, not my flattering smile. The circle around me would be much smaller, but what does that matter, as long as they're sincere?
Anne Frank
The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
Johan Huizinga
If you want to treat your book as a child, the finished book should be an adult, capable to stand on its own legs and able to weather the thunder. Not a baby that still needs to be defended.
Martyn V. Halm
You should not try to live without thinking and feeling, for then you are only a piece of machinery, not a human being. Even if it hurts. Even if the thing you have to think of are sad, think them through; live them through and write or tell me. Only when we completely work through our thinking and feeling do we live a full life. ~From a letter to Diet Eman from Hein Sietsma
Diet Eman
You wanna eat? I can hand you a spoon.
Mr. Probz
Sometimes I'm so deeply buried under self-reproaches that I long for a word of comfort to help me dig myself out again.
Anne Frank
The sadness will last forever.
Vincent van Gogh
Grief is one big, gaping hole, isn’t it? It’s everywhere and all consuming. Some days you think you can’t go on because the only thing waiting for you is more despair. Some days you don’t want to go on because it’s easier to give up than to get hurt again.
Marieke Nijkamp
You are afraid to suffer, but it were better to thank God for it, since the more you undergo down here, the less you will endure above. Grief is a portion of one's heritage taken in advance from Purgatory.
Saint Lydwine of Schiedam
I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends.
Vincent van Gogh
This cry for mercy is possible only when we are willing to confess that somehow, somewhere, we ourselves have something to do with our losses. Crying for mercy is a recognition that blaming God, the world, or others for our losses does not do full justice to the truth of who we are. At the moment we are willing to take responsibility, even for the pain we didn't cause directly, blaming is connected into an acknowledgement of our own role in human brokenness. The prayer for God's mercy comes from a heart that knows that this human brokenness is not a fatal condition of which we have become the sad victims, but the bitter fruit of the human choice to say "No" to love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
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
And so I discovered that it is not on our own forgiveness any more than on our own goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When he tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
Corrie ten Boom
To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.
Corrie ten Boom
Since it has quietly began to snow,new distances have awakened within me.
Gerrit Achterberg
Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.
Corrie ten Boom
Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
Corrie ten Boom
I bought a backscrabber. One more reason to have no need for a relationship.
Martijn Benders
Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.
Michel Faber
On any journey, we must find out where we are before we can plan the first step.
Kathy Boevink
Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and as noted earlier, diagnostic categories may overlap significantly. The symptom clusters are as follows:Alterations in Regulation of Affect ( Emotion ) and ImpulsesChanges in Relationship with othersSomatic SymptomsChanges in MeaningChanges in the perception of SelfChanges in Attention and Consciousness
Suzette Boon
Changes in Relationship with others:It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be able to distinguish between good and bad intentions in other people. Some parts do not seem to trust anyone, while other parts may be so vulnerable and needy that they do not pay attention to clues that perhaps a person is not trustworthy. Some parts like to be close to others or feel a desperate need to be close and taken care of, while other parts fear being close or actively dislike people. Some parts are afraid of being in relationships while others are afraid of being rejected or criticized. This naturally sets up major internal as well as relational conflicts.
Suzette Boon
God dealt with our whole situation on the cross; there is nothing left for you to settle. Just say to Him, "Lord, I cannot forgive and I will no longer try to do it; but I trust that You in me will do it. I can't forgive and love; but I trust that You will forgive and love in my place and that You will do these things in me.
Corrie ten Boom
As I did, there, in perfect condition, to be admired by five sets of wondering eyes, was an enormous, glistening, moist, chocolate cake.
Brother Andrew
The non-serious and awkward way of approach faces the collapse and loss in one's trust.
Ehsan Sehgal
Trust is the fragrance of your life breathing, if you lose it, your life journey is going to fruitless; you are living just to live as worthless.
Ehsan Sehgal
I observed that plants not only have a faculty to correct bad air in six to ten days, by growing in it...but that they perform this important office in a complete manner in a few hours; that this wonderful operation is by no means owing to the vegetation of the plant, but to the influence of light of the sun upon the plant.
Jan Ingenhousz
If it was the warmth of the sun, and not its light, that produced this operation, it would follow, that, by warming the water near the fire about as much as it would have been in the sun, this very air would be produced; but this is far from being the case..
Jan Ingenhousz
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
The larks were singing everywhere, a heron flew past, the sky was so high in the trees were wrestling all around the house and the light-- could you catch the light and hug it tight and take it inside you?
Nescio
Can you imagine how incredibly quiet it was everywhere, when the gentlemen from this world" — he made a vague circular gesture towards the battalions of meditating Asians behind him — "were hatching and proclaiming their ideas? Anyone who now tries to follow these ideas in order to find the road back to what they were talking about, is faced with obstacles that would have driven an entire tribe of oriental ascetics into the ravine. The world from which they felt it so necessary to retreat would have seemed idyllic to us. We live in a vision of hell, and we have actually got used to it." He looked at his statues and continued, "We have become different people. We still look the same, but we have nothing in common with them any more. We are differently programmed. Anyone who now wants to become like them must acquire a big dose of madness first; otherwise he will no longer be able to bear the life of our world. We are not designed for their kind of life.
Cees Nooteboom
I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the only place where speeches are given. Some hundred thousand teachers teach every day. They all speak 45 minutes, more times a day. They have been doing this for years. Every teacher knows exactly when the time will be over and that by then his speech will need to come to a natural end. It is this tension that determines the success of a lesson. It is a sign of the times that we forget these daily achievements in education. A million students daily attend several ‘live’ lectures and this in secondary education alone. These are high ratings!
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart; that is, at that point of our being where there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one. There God's Spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There heart speaks to heart, because there we stand before the face of the Lord, all-seeing, with us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
For many of us prayer means nothing more than speaking with God. And since it usually seems to be a quite one-sided affair, prayer simply means talking to God. This idea is enough to create great frustrations. If I present a problem, I expect a solution; if I formulate a question, I expect an answer; if I ask for guidance, I expect a response. And when it seems, increasingly, that I am talking into the dark, it is not so strange that I soon begin to suspect that my dialogue with God is in fact a monologue. Then I may begin to ask myself: To whom am I really speaking, God or myself?
Henri J.M. Nouwen
When we say to people, 'I will pray for you,' we make a very important commitment. The sad thing is that this remark often remains nothing but a well-meant expression of concern. But when we learn to descend with our mind into our heart, then all those who have become part of our lives are led into the healing presence of God and touched by him in the center of our being. We are speaking here about a mystery for which words are inadequate. It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, 'Prove that you are a good person.' Another voice says, 'You’d better be ashamed of yourself.' There also is a voice that says, 'Nobody really cares about you,' and one that says, 'Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.' But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, 'You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.' That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen.That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us 'my Beloved'.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The prayer from the heart is a great power.
Ehsan Sehgal
a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
[Praying] demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your [fellow human]. This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing-- that demands real effort.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.
Corrie ten Boom
When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight.
Joseph O'Neill
Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Joseph O'Neill
...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 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
At such times Daddy, Mummy and Margot leave me cold. I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird whose wings have been clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage. "Go outside, laugh, and take a breath of fresh air," a voice cries within me, but I don't even feel a response any more; I go and lie on the divan and sleep, to make the time pass more quickly, and the stillness and terrible fear, because there is no way of killing them.
Anne Frank
I'm sorry to say it, but it was hard on me to see life continue all around.
Diet Eman
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.
Vincent van Gogh
I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.
Anne Frank
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
Thomas loved words, particularly if he didn’t understand them.
Guus Kuijer
Can we only speak when we are fully living what we are saying? If all our words had to cover all our actions, we would be doomed to permanent silence! Sometimes we are called to proclaim God’s love even when we are not yet fully able to live it. Does that mean we are hypocrites? Only when our own words no longer call us to conversion. Nobody completely lives up to his or her own ideals and visions. But by proclaiming our ideals and visions with great conviction and great humility, we may gradually grow into the truth we speak. As long as we know that our lives always will speak louder than our words, we can trust that our words will remain humble.
Henri J.M. Nouwen