Quotes by Dutch Authors - Page 13

It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in our lives immediately wrench us out of our musings, and our own adventures throw us back irrevocably upon our personal feelings—joy, boredom, suffering, anger, or a smile.
Vincent van Gogh
Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?
M.C. Escher
In would rather die of passion than of boredom.
Vincent van Gogh
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
Work, love, courage and hope,Make me good and help me cope!
Anne Frank
I'll show then that Anne Frank wasn't born yesterday
Anne Frank
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
Joseph O'Neill
I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.
Anne Frank
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
Vincent van Gogh
The feminine way is to look at the potential that is available and the masculine way is to look at what is not working and to find a solution to change that. So when we balance these two energies together, the solution is to co-create a New Earth together with Nature where we look at the potential of each and everyone involved to make a difference.
Maurice Spees
A voice within me is sobbing, "You see that's what's become of you. You're surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don't listen to the advice of your own better half." Believe me, I'd like to listen, but it doesn't work, because if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I'm not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and setatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can't keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, an finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.Yours, Anne M. Frank.
Anne Frank
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
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
Baruch Spinoza
Our minds are always active. We analyze, reflect, daydream, or dream. There is not a moment during the day or night when we are not thinking. You might say our thinking is 'unceasing.' Sometimes we wish that we could stop thinking for a while; that would save us from many worries, guilt feelings, and fears. Our ability to think is our greatest gift, but it is also the source of our greatest pain. Do we have to become victims of our unceasing thoughts? No, we can convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer by making our inner monologue into a continuing dialogue with our God, who is the source of all love.Let’s break out of our isolation and realize that Someone who dwells in the center of our beings wants to listen with love to all that occupies and preoccupies our minds.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
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
There are no walls, no bolts, no locks that anyone can put on your mind.
Otto Frank
He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.
Baruch Spinoza
The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things
Baruch Spinoza
The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body
Baruch Spinoza
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
The greatest gift a church can receive is to have a group of families who take their responsibilities with such Christian seriousness that they are willing to completely alter their lifestyle to raise up disciples for Jesus Christ.
Abraham Kuyper
You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.' It certainly is not easy to hear that voice in a world filled with voices that shout: 'You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody- unless you can demonstrate the opposite.' These negative voices are so loud and so persistent that it is easy to believe them. That's the great trap. It is the trap of self-rejection.
Henri Nouwen
But miracles still happen, even if we don't think they do.
Diet Eman
I felt peace, even though I was still scared to death. I thought that, whatever would happen to me - I could still be killed. I didn't know - and in what I'd already been through, God was in control.
Diet Eman
To me it was real war and my life was at stake, and I believe that all those clandestine spy games we played as children helped when the Occupation came.
Diet Eman
They thought we were stupid to do it, (hide Jews) of course; in fact, it was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for Jews.
Diet Eman
O Father, console them and please spare our country from that terrible disaster, not because we are any better but only out of grace. And if it has to be different, then teach me to pray: "Your will be done." O please protect him whom my soul lives! -From the journal of Diet Eman
Diet Eman
Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.
Corrie ten Boom
Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
Maybe this journey is a way for you to get your redemption..." he said softly, "Maybe, if Elder Man Belduran is right, it is the start of a journey, that leads to redemption for all of us...""Not all of us... There's no redemption for Elder Man Vaymaz..." Melchor replied softly, before turning and continuing to walk.
Nathalie M.L. Römer
The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—an harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes... and then set out upon the stories' various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well.
Charles de Lint
Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.
Cees Nooteboom
The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.
Charles de Lint
Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.
Charles de Lint
Everybody's got a true home—maybe not where they're living, butwhere their heart lives.
Charles de Lint
I listen to my heart and mind when I plan the things, but I cannot support those, who do not listen to their heart and
Ehsan Sehgal
True genius without heart is a thing of nought - for not great understanding alone, not intelligence alone, nor both together, make genius. Love! Love! Love! that is the soul of genius.
Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin
It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as "a contrite heart," have come to refer only to the personal experiences of guilt and willingness to do penance for it. The awareness of our impurity in thoughts, words and deeds can indeed put us in a remorseful mood and create in us the hope for a forgiving gesture. But if the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and the illness of millions of people and he unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things.
Baruch Spinoza
T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings.
Charles de Lint
Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.
Charles de Lint
The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.
Eddie Van Halen
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
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
Are you kidding me? How can you even ask me that? I'm stuck in a world I have no hope of surviving, I'm forced to depend on a guy who thinks I can't be trusted, I'm being pushed into marrying a man who believes I can't talk, and I've lost everyone I've ever cared about! Why wouldn't I feel uneasy?
Cheryl Koevoet
One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water--the boy had his right arm around the girl's shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand, and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it's so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can't do and don't dare to do, that they never know where to stop--no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other.
Nescio
...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
If I get married, I want to be very married.
Audrey Hepburn
Do you know what hurts so much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when that happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of use dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.
Corrie ten Boom
Victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage, and pain in a world that longs to forget.
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
The Diary of a Young Girl - This book fills you with sadness. I like this book
Anne Frank
Tell me, what kind of functions does pain have when one is convicted to 100 whippings in Saudie Arabia? You claim pain has a function, I claim that's scientific rubbish. The only thing pain really does is cause an instant reaction that is not rational and usually quite erratic. The famous example of the hand in boiling water, for example. You say it proves pain has a function. But exactly because of the spasmic reaction lots and lots of people will drop the bowl with boiling water over their entire bodies causing serious burns. So what was the 'function' of this pain? Pain and fear cause confusion and trauma. If pain actually did have a rational function, chronic pain would not exist.
Martijn Benders
I can be happy or unhappy in all situations. I am sure of it, because I have been. I have felt distraught and joyful in situations of abundance as well as poverty, in situations of popularity and anonymity, in situations of success and failure. The difference was never based on the situation itself, but always on my state of mind and heart. When I knew I was walking with God, I always felt happy and at peace. When I was entangled in my own complaints and emotional needs, I always felt restless and divided.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
We being satiate with continual wars, let the desire of peace a little move us.
Erasmus
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.
Etty Hillesum
My life is a work of art and nature is my temple!
Maurice Spees
The nature of everything is, fair and based on justice. We make that unfair and unjust.
Ehsan Sehgal