Quotes by Dutch Authors - Page 14

I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer.
Anne Frank
Most of those who have written about the Affects, and men’s way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.
Baruch Spinoza
I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.
Baruch Spinoza
Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper.
Adriaan Kortlandt
I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.
Charles de Lint
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
Anne Frank
When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers. That means we are not only in the world, but also of the world. Then we become what the world makes us. We are intelligent because someone gives us a high grade. We are helpful because someone says thanks. We are likable because someone likes us. And we are important because someone considers us indispensable. In short, we are worthwhile because we have successes. And the more we allow our accomplishments — the results of our actions — to become the criteria of our self-esteem, the more we are going to walk on our mental and spiritual toes, never sure if we will be able to live up to the expectations which we created by our last successes. In many people’s lives, there is a nearly diabolic chain in which their anxieties grow according to their successes. This dark power has driven many of the greatest artists into self-destruction.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
As long as you're in the food business, why not make sweets?
Anne Frank
Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.
Anne Frank
Whether someone is useful only matters if you value people by their use.
Corinne Duyvis
The heart upon which, the sense of humanity and the passion has died, that heart is the emptiness of a conception of love, mercy, and fairness of the principles. Indeed, such people are the terrorists, whether in uniform or not, in power or not, who work, as the army of the evil. The world is under that force.
Ehsan Sehgal
In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
Vindication is the privilege of the victorious
Jelle Peters
Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain.
Corrie ten Boom
We should, however, not forget that ethnic cleansing, especially of nonwhite Muslim peoples, has old historical roots in Russia. John Dunlop, for instance, reminds us that “in May 1856, Count Kiselev, minister of state domains, informed officials in the Crimea that Alexander [tsar Alexander II] was interested in ‘cleansing’ (Kiselev used the verb oshishchat’) Crimea of as many Tatars as possible.” That the tsarist empire was interested in annexing foreign lands, but not in annexing foreign peoples, was expressed by the famous remark of a tsarist minister that “Russia needs Armenia, but she has no need of Armenians.” [192]
Marcel H. Van Herpen
Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.
Rutger Bregman
History doesn't remember gardens.…You forgot the wise administrators, those who kept the peace, those who brought prosperity. You needn’t feel embarrassed, though. So did history.
Andrew Ashling
History doesn't remember gardens.…You forgot the wise administrators, those who kept the peace, those who brought prosperity. You needn’t feel embarrassed, though. So did history.
Andrew Ashling
If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
Frans de Waal
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
And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
Vincent van Gogh
For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It's not the most social pastime.
Audrey Hepburn
I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.
Piet Mondrian
The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings—not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.
Vincent van Gogh
There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed.
M.C. Escher
Many works would be senseless, real junk, but for the fact that, being art, they are exhibited because they have a message of almost religious importance, interpreting man and his world - yes, perhaps even as junk.
H. R. Rookmaaker
Choose only one master — Nature.
Rembrandt
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
One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.
Vincent van Gogh
Colour is a matter of personal opinion.
Tessa de Loo
In art one idea is as good as another.
Willem De Kooning
Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.
Esther Verhoef
Wonderful art can spring from misery,I'm the last person to deny that.I'd go even further:the best works of art of all time are probably stemmed from the deep human sorrow or hellish frustration,the death of a loved one or a divorce and yes:jealousy.Heartache and impotence as the man-spring for making the unverifiable verifiable and for giving it face.How romantic,beautiful and especially useful pain and misery can be.
Esther Verhoef
Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a Way of being.
Frederick Franck
In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.
Vincent van Gogh
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
Vincent van Gogh
Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.
Rembrandt
I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made..
Vincent van Gogh
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
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
Vincent van Gogh
The soul flies away from the body when God calls back it to the real place that starts life forever, indeed.
Ehsan Sehgal
Everybody has a soul." I turn to Pelly. "And that means you, too." "I'm not so sure of that," he says. "What does it feel like?" "Having a soul?" I look at Maxine, but she only shrugs. "I don't know," I tell Pelly. "I don't have anything to compare it to- you know, what not having a sould would feel like." We fall into a kind of awkward silence. I don't know about the others, but I'm working on what a soul is and not coming up with a whole lot. I mean, I just always thought of it as me- what I feel like being me. But surely Pelly feels like himself, so that means he's got a soul right? But if that's not your soul, then what is? It's weird and not something you really think about, is it?
Charles de Lint
Deal with all this, live with myself, you mean? I honestly don't know. I stand often enough at the abyss of my soul, asking that same question, looking down into the dark crevices where the black monsters dwell on the bottom. They gaze up at me, and I look them in the eyes. “This also you are,” they say, and I almost fall into the void.”“And then?”Anaxantis shrugged.“And then? I turn around and go do what needs to be done. What else is there?
Andrew Ashling
A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.
Michel Faber
There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.
Vincent van Gogh
Nothing doth worse become a man (I will not say a Christian man) than war.
Erasmus
Moreover God hath ordained man in this world, as it were, the very image of himself, to the intent, that he, as it were a god on earth, should provide for the wealth of all creatures.
Erasmus
...once again I saw that incredulous question, that dawning hope: We are not alone, then? We have brothers in other places? We have friends we never knew?
Brother Andrew
In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call.
Henri Nouwen
All during that prison time I really lived by prayer. Be in prayer always, we're told, and back then I was.
Diet Eman
Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
All through the short afternoon they kept coming, the people who counted themselves Father's friends. Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father's secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn't know they were there.
Corrie ten Boom
Mostly the beauty has the dangerous, suspicious, untrusting, and even vanity waves in it, and that indeed, prevail too.
Ehsan Sehgal
In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.
Harry Mulisch
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank
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
I love this world," he added. "That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can, but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands.
Charles de Lint
What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don't acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women's share in society is.
Anne Frank
There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don't need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.
Audrey Hepburn