Quotes by Dutch Authors - Page 4

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
I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, I can't do anything to change events anyway.
Anne Frank
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Indeed, the victory by the force of weapons shows just one's tenure and occupancy. Conversely, the real victory breezes only by dialogue and love.
Ehsan Sehgal
In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.
Vincent van Gogh
We adore chaos because we love to produce order.
M.C. Escher
Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.
Joseph O'Neill
Why are we worried!" Rolf said suddenly. "This is God's work. He'll make a way for us.
Brother Andrew
It wasn't that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the uselessness of my worries and so refocused my whole attention.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.
Michel Faber
The many contradictions in our lives – such as being home while feeling homeless, being busy while feeling bored, being popular while feeling lonely, being believers while feeling many doubts – can frustrate, irritate, and even discourage us. They make us feel that we are never fully present. Every door that opens for us makes us see how many more doors are closed.But there is another response. These same contradictions can bring us into touch with a deeper longing, for the fulfillment of a desire that lives beneath all desires and that only God can satisfy. Contradictions, thus understood, create the friction that can help us move toward God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.
Meindert DeJong
There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”It is clear that the Russian leadership has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian militias), and active disinformation, all reminiscent of the old Soviet style.In this way Russia almost succeeded in hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a Russian war against Georgia in Georgia. There was not a single Georgian soldier that crossed the Russian frontier at any point. The Georgian troops that went into South Ossetia did not cross international frontiers, but intervened in their own country, no different from Russian troops intervening in Chechnya. It was Russian and not Georgian troops that crossed the border of another, sovereign country, in breach of the principles of international law [230―31].
Marcel H. Van Herpen
Pickpocket is a sink-or-swim profession, not something that can be taught in the comfort of your living room.
Martyn V. Halm
A good pickpocket isn’t afraid of intimacy.
Martyn V. Halm
Marketing leaders instead must ask, “What values and goals guide our brand strategy, what capabilities drive marketing excellence, and what structures and ways of working will support them?” Structure must follow strategy—not the other way around.
Marc de Swaan Arons
In a remarkable midrash (commentary) on Proverbs, we read the following: “All of the festivals will be abolished in the future [the Messianic Age], but Purim will never be abolished.”The miracle of Purim is very different from the miracles mentioned in the Torah. While the latter were overt miracles, such as the ten plagues in Egypt and the splitting of the Red Sea, the miracle of Purim was covert. No law of nature was violated in the Purim story and the Jews were saved by seemingly normal historical occurrences. Had we lived in those days, we would have noticed nothing unusual. Only retroactively are we astonished that seemingly unrelated and insignificant human acts led to the redemption of the Jews. The discovery that these events concealed a miracle could only be made after the fact.Covert miracles will never cease to exist explains the Torah Temimah. In fact, they take place every day. The midrash on Proverbs is not suggesting that the actual festivals mentioned in the Torah will be nullified in future days. Rather we should read the midrash as follows: Overt miracles, which we celebrate on festivals mentioned in the Torah, no longer occur. But covert miracles such as those celebrated on Purim will never end; they continue to occur every day of the year. Purim, probably rooted in a historical event of many years ago, functions as a constant reminder that the Purim story never ended. We are still living it. The Megillah is open-ended; it was not and will never be completed!
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Jews have been an ever-dying people that never died. They have experienced a continuous resurrection, like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in the valley. This has become the sine qua non of every Jew. It is the mystery of the hidden miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming destruction. Our refusal to surrender has turned our story into one long, unending Purim tale.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
[I]t is no doubt true that our image of what a messiah might look like may keep us from recognizing the real thing when it stands before us. Could it be that we have embellished the long-awaited event with so many aggadic flourishes that we can no longer recognize the reality when it happens? Could our overly literal reading of our sages’ poetic descriptions have led us to overlook completely the miracle as it happened? One of the dangers of taking the statements and speculations of our sages as literal truth—when they were not meant as such—is the distortion of our expectations.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Misfortunes never come singly.
Anne Frank
Success Is Hidden Behind All The Things You " Must" Do
Marieke Stoop
Express Your Appreciation To Your Employees. Do Not Think They Already Know, Cause They Don't
Marieke Stoop
However, what he wanted was impossible: the serenity of the Gods cannot be achieved by the sword.
Andrew Ashling
Little bundle of contradictions
Anne Frank
Am I afraid to die? I am every time I let myself be seduced by the noisy voices of my world telling me that my "little life" is all I have and advising me to cling to it with all my might. But when I let these voices move to the background of my life and listen to that small soft voice calling me the Beloved, I know that there is nothing to fear and that dying is the greatest act of love, the act that leads me into the eternal embrace of my God whose love is everlasting.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
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
You as a whole person are thus unable to reconcile conflicts about anger and learn to tolerate and express anger in healthy ways. Inner turmoil and dissociation are maintained.
Suzette Boon
Stay away to abuse and misemploy knowledge, and neutrality with jealousy since it reflects the lack of sense.
Ehsan Sehgal
The jealousy holds neither the colours and nor the places. It is voiceless and timeless a time bomb within you to blow up only you, not others.
Ehsan Sehgal
I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it is the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills.
Audrey Hepburn
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
In a neurotic society, insane ideas can become 'normal', the current triumph of tribalism is the result of rabid global anti-intellectualism.
Martijn Benders
I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree.
Erasmus
Just don’t stare at my ass, Landemere,” he added.“I wasn’t staring at your ass,” Arranulf, who had been staring at his ass, said.
Andrew Ashling
self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.
Baruch Spinoza
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
Baruch Spinoza
Talent is 98% hard work - even Brel said so. The best signal for lack of talent is therefore quite simply low production. That does of course not mean high production guarantees talent, so something does exist that needs to be present - what is that? Talent and Drive - both are quite useless without the other, but what exactly is 'talent'? I would say its a form of the unconditioned: in some people it survives, even unto old age. Some learn to focus it on a particular craft. But without drive, it still goes nowhere.
Martijn Benders
No matter the life-shattering circumstance that delivers the devastating blow to our spirit, God is bigger. He is faithful and unchanging, merciful and consistent with His offer to us, that through it all, we will be comforted, we will be loved, we will be HELD.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you feel and the agitation you feel and the rage and the helplessness you feel right now.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
Mary was my first encounter with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which at that time was called multiple personality disorder. As dramatic as its symptoms are, the internal splitting and emergence of distinct identities experienced in DID represent only the extreme end of the spectrum of mental life.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
I cut myself up really badly with the lid of a tin can. They took me to the emergency room, but I couldn’t tell the doctor what I had done to cut myself—I didn’t have any memory of it. The ER doctor was convinced that dissociative identity disorder didn’t exist. . . . A lot of people involved in mental health tell you it doesn’t exist. Not that you don’t have it, but that it doesn’t exist.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?
Charles de Lint
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.- Aristotle
Marco G. Casteleijn
I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else
Cornelius Van Til
This may seem labouring the obvious, but in Japan one meets intelligent people who claim that ‘logic’ is something invented in the West to allow Westerners to win discussions. Indeed, the belief is widespread that the Japanese can as happily do without logic now as they supposedly have for centuries past.
Karel Van Wolferen
People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above.
Michel Faber
When Sartre says man has been thrown into the world, he is alone, there is no God, we are responsible for what we are, what we do, I say yes!"The affirmative echoed around the woods. The dog pricked up his ears. This man has no one to talk to, thought Inni."But when he then asks me to be responsible for the world as well, for others, I say no! No. Why should I be? 'When man chooses himself, he chooses all men.' Why? I have not asked for anything. I have nothing to do with the vermin I see around me. I live out my time because I have to, that is all.
Cees Nooteboom
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
Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.
Etty Hillesum
Pah…commoners, traders." Ergus made a disparaging gesture.Traders with money, Ergus. Money they put at the disposition of young Tanahkos," Lmachdan said in a dry tone. "Money that turns into soldiers. Soldiers who are used to extort tribute from us. Tribute that is turned into more soldiers. The warlord has a good thing going, I'll say that for him.
Andrew Ashling
You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.
Michel Faber
Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.
Janwillem van de Wetering
So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.
Cornelius Van Til
Hey," Anaxantis protested. "Oh," he added, when the Muktar prince took his member in his mouth. "Oh... that's what you meant by servicing." He laughed softly."Aw, aw, teeth, teeth, no teeth," he hissed suddenly."Sowwy," Timishi, mumbled with his mouth full. "Towd you it wouldn't je jood.
Andrew Ashling
Criticism, upon the right one, surpasses and prevails, nothing since it causes a sign of self-discredit.
Ehsan Sehgal
I am called to enter into the inner sanctuary of my own being where God has chosen to dwell. The only way to that place is prayer, unceasing prayer, Many struggles and much pain can clear the way but I am certain that only unceasing prayer can let me enter it.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
True beauty in a woman is reflected in the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows.
Audrey Hepburn
Christians need a new filling of the Holy Spirit to love those who disagree with them. And the greatest expression of love is to share with them the most precious thing a Christian has, which is the good news of the salvation of Jesus Christ.
Brother Andrew
To explain the matter I will employ a simile, which yet, I confess is very dissimilar; but its dissimilitude is greatly in favour of my sentiments. A rich man bestows, on a poor and famishing beggar, alms by which he may be able to maintain himself and his family. Does it cease to be a pure gift, because the beggar extends his hand to receive it? Can it be said with propriety, that 'the alms depended partly on THE LIBERALITY of the Donor, and partly on THE LIBERTY of the Receiver,' though the latter would not have possessed the alms unless he had received it by stretching out his hand? Can it be correctly said, BECAUSE THE BEGGAR IS ALWAYS PREPARED TO RECEIVE, that 'he can have the alms, or not have it, just as he pleases?' If these assertions cannot be truly made about a beggar who receives alms, how much less can they be made about the gift of faith, for the receiving of which far more acts of Divine Grace are required!
James Arminius