Dutch Inspirational Quotes

Sebab kita bersukacita bukan karena memotong padi; kita bersukacita karena memotong padi yang kita tanam sendiri.

Luck comes and goes; you have to seize it. Bad luck comes and goes; it must be overcome. But I will never, never sit at the side of the road showing my wounds and shouting, 'It's destiny'!

Evolution is a theory with more holes than a Dutch dam of swiss cheese.

If you keep looking, you will find it. It has nothing to do with luck, and everything to do with courage. Be brave.

The true meaning of life is to become the true meaning of someone else's

A boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand kim

History can never be changed, but it can be healed.

The Dutch Reformed Church was the state church of the apartheid regime and a fervent supporter of apartheid; it inspired and condoned rape, abduction and murder.

Blijf lezen, blijf leren, blijf proberen. Als je altijd hetzelfde blijft doen, dan blijf je ook dezelfde resultaten krijgen.

I often get inspiration from literature and art, as well as from simply keeping my eyes open as I walk along the street. Talent alone won't get you far in this profession because there are too many other factors involved. You have to be fully aware of what is going on in the world at large, not just in the design world. And street culture is just as important as high culture. We don't have to be artists or architects ourselves to get inspiration from those disciplines.

As far back as 1563 the courageous Dutch physician Johannes Wier published his masterwork, De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Delusions About Demons) in which he states that the collective and voluntary self-accusation of older women through which they exposed themselves to torture and death by their inquisitors was in itself an act inspired by the devil, a trick of demons, whose aim it was to doom not only the innocent women but also their reckless judges. Wier was the first medical man to introduce what became the psychiatric concept of DELUSION and mental blindness. Wherever his book had influence, the persecution of witches ceased, in some countries more than one hundred and fifty years before it was finally brought to an end throughout the civilized world. His work and his insights became one of the main instruments for fighting the witch delusion and physical torture (Baschwitz). Wier realized even then that witches were scapegoats for the inner confusion and desperation of their judges and of the “Zeitgeist” in general.

For instance, we are regularly told, “James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769,” supposedly inspired by watching steam rise from a teakettle’s spout. Unfortunately for this splendid fiction, Watt actually got the idea for his particular steam engine while repairing a model of Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine, which Newcomen had invented 57 years earlier and of which over a hundred had been manufactured in England by the time of Watt’s repair work. Newcomen’s engine, in turn, followed the steam engine that the Englishman Thomas Savery patented in 1698, which followed the steam engine that the Frenchman Denis Papin designed (but did not build) around 1680, which in turn had precursors in the ideas of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens and others. All this is not to deny that Watt greatly improved Newcomen’s engine (by incorporating a separate steam condenser and a double-acting cylinder), just as Newcomen had greatly improved Savery’s.

With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world's premier long-range shippers. Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the worlds of Daniel Defoe, "more properly called slaves." First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618, the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children's sobriquet "Duty boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.

For all walls are made of glass, one way or another.

I ain't inspired any more, Sherm; there was this painting I saw in the museum in Amsterdam. It was called 'Christ Preaching in the House of Mary and Martha.' And the whole foreground of the picture, maybe three-fourths of the canvas, is a kitchen in one of them Dutch houses, and there's a cook plucking chickens. All around her there's dead rabbits, pheasants, turkeys, ducks, sides of beef, six kinds of fish, clams, oysters, potatoes, apples, eggplant, kohlrabi, rutabaga, carrots, Swiss chard, and God knows what else. Food, food, food. And where's Christ? Well, way back in a little alcove off the kitchen, there He is, with the women, preaching. Who cares about Him, when everyone wants to stuff their gut with rabbit and turkey? Who hears His sermon, when there's lots of roast duck and fried oysters?" "What in the world has that to do with our survey?" asked Wettlaufer. "Sherman, you and me and this survey and these people like Huguettte Roux and Willem Kruis--we're preaching way back in the corner to two people. But most of the world is in that kitchen drooling over those rabbits and geese!

It was a glorious experience to travel by rail for the children and the panoramic views of Africa through the big glass window in the back of the last car were beyond description. It was just as you would expect it to be as described in a vintage National Geographic magazine, with springbok and other wild animals abounding. The distance is approximately the same as from New York to Chicago and took an overnight. Adeline and Lucia talked late into the night as the children tried to hear what was being said. There was a lot of catching up to do, but it had been a long and exhausting day and the next thing they all knew, was that it was the following morning and the train was approaching Cape Town, affectionately known as the “Tavern of the Seas.” When the train finally came to a halt, after being switched from one track to another through the extensive rail yards, the realization sank in that this was their new life. Kaapstad, Cape Town in Afrikaans, would be their new home and German, the language they had spoken until now, was history. A new family came to meet them and helped carry their luggage to waiting cars. All of these strange people speaking strange languages were uncles, aunts and nephews. An attractive elderly woman who spoke a language very similar to German, but definitely not the same, was the children’s new Ouma. However, to avoid confusion she was to be addressed as Granny. She lived in a Dutch gabled house called “Kismet” located in a beautiful suburb known as “Rosebank.” This would be their home until Adeline could find a place where they could settle in and start their new life.

It is believed by many critics that Vermeer was inspired in this work by Ter Borch, a Dutch artist who had tackled the theme previously ten years ago. In 1940 A Lady Writing was bought by Sir Harry Oakes, the magistrate of the Bahamas, where it was hung until Oakes’ death. After he had opposed a casino license, Oakes was tragically murdered by the Mafia. The painting was then sold by his widow to Horace Havemeyer, whose sons later bequeathed it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Verliefdheid rust op het roekeloze besluit verliefd te worden. Met zijn besluit had Simon de kwelling over zichzelf afgeroepen. De welling was masochistisch en theatraal. Het was gezocht ongeluk, zelfgeschapen wanhoop, ijdele parodie. Allemaal waar. Maar wat het ook mocht zijn, de kwelling werd er niet minder op.

Verliefdheid rust op het roekeloze besluit om verliefd te worden. Met zijn besluit had Simon de kwelling over zichzelf afgeroepen. De kwelling was masochistisch en theatraal. Het was gezocht ongeluk, zelfgeschapen wanhoop, ijdele parodie. Allemaal waar. Maar wat het ook mocht zijn, de kwelling werd er niet minder om.

Op haar wangen zaten weer van die zwarte, natte strepen. Zo had er hij er ook wel eens uitgezien in de tijd dat hij in Alkmaar kranten had rondgebracht en met donkergrijs geworden vingertoppen in zijn ogen had gewreven. Het was een voorrecht om op haar te lijken.

Dat het lente werd, was een incident.

De een hield de ander niet in de armen, maar toch leek het alsof zij elkaar wiegden.

With the help of Dutch traders, by 1750 the cigar eventually made its way to Holland and then to Russia. There, Empress Catherine II had her cigars decorated with delicate silk bands so that her royal fingers would not become stained while she smoked. This simple yet ingenious device would subsequently inspire the cigar bands that we know today.

TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES AGO, Amsterdam was the world’s commercial center, but many of its wealthy merchants were reeling from one of the world’s first financial crises. The shares of the British East India Company had collapsed, culminating in a series of bank failures, government bailouts, and ultimately nationalization, a debacle that rippled across the continent’s nascent markets. For a little-known Dutch merchant and stockbroker, it proved the inspiration for an idea ahead of its time. In 1774, Abraham von Ketwich set up a novel, pooled investment trust he called Eendragt Maakt Magt—Dutch for “Unity Creates Strength.” This would sell two thousand shares for five hundred guilders each to individual investors, and invest the proceeds into a diversified portfolio of fifty bonds. These were divided into ten different categories, from plantation loans, bonds backed by Spanish or Danish toll road payments, to an assortment of European government bonds. At the time, bonds were physical certificates written on paper or even goatskin, and these were stored in a solid iron chest with three locks, which could be opened only by Eendragt Maakt Magt’s board and an independent notary. The aim was to pay a 4 percent annual dividend, and disburse the final proceeds only after twenty-five years, hoping that the diversity of the portfolio would protect investors.1 As it turns out, a subsequent Anglo-Dutch war in 1780 and Napoleon’s occupation of Holland in 1795 wreaked havoc on Eendragt Maakt Magt. The annual payments never materialized, and investors didn’t receive their money back until 1824, albeit then receiving 561 guilders a share. Nonetheless, Eendragt Maakt Magt was a brilliant invention that would go on to inspire the birth of investment trusts in Great Britain and eventually the mutual fund we know today. It is also arguably the ultimate intellectual forefather of today’s index funds, given its minimal trading, diversified approach, and low fees, charging a mere 0.2 percent a year.

When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought...

Pharmaceuticals are essentially biomimetic in principle, but are not often designed to have no side effects. Drugs were historically created from natural substances; the word drug comes from the Dutch droog, meaning "dried plant." As evidenced in Neanderthal archaeological digs, natural medicines have been in use for more than sixty thousand years. Excavations have revealed the use of at least seven herbal remedies that still show proven therapeutic value, including ephedra (as a cold remedy), hollyhock (poor man's aspirin), and yarrow (wound dressing).

Good works lean on each other. Great works lean on Faith and Hope. Lasting works lean on Love.

What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism. As

At around the turn of the twentieth century, two powerful, capricious forces met and magnified each other. Together they propelled Vermeer into the most rarified ranks of celebrity. The first was a shift in taste—inspired in good measure by rapturous travelers’ tales, Americans declared all things Dutch hugely desirable. The frenzy was dubbed “Holland mania.

De boeddhisten zeggen dat een les zoiets is als 'een vinger die naar de maan wijst'. De maan (verlichting) is het ding waar het om gaat en de wijzende vinger probeert ons die kant op te krijgen, maar het is zaak niet de vinger met de maan te verwarren. Voor de schrijvers onder ons die ervan dromen ooit net zo'n verhaal te schrijven als de verhalen waarvan we hielden, waardoor we op aangename wijze werden opgeslokt en die eventjes werkelijker leken dan de zogenaamde werkelijkheid, is het doel ('de maan') de geestelijkheid te bereiken die ons in staat stelt zo'n verhaal te schrijven. Alle workshop-praat en verhalentheorie en aforistische, slimme, ambacht bevorderende slogans zijn slechts vingers die wijzen naar die maan en ons proberen te dirigeren naar die geestelijkheid.

Mennonites were an Anabaptist denomination born out of the Protestant Reformation in the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of Central Europe. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, orthodox authorities lethally persecuted the Mennonites. The Mennonites did not intend to leave behind one site of oppression to build another in America. Mennonites therefore circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688. “There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are,” they wrote. “In Europe there are many oppressed” for their religion, and “here those are oppressed” for their “black colour.” Both oppressions were wrong. Actually, as an oppressor, America “surpass[ed] Holland and Germany.” Africans had the “right to fight for their freedom.” The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists. Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent self-interest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.

The life cord became thin filament, and the heaven cord a rope, by the times the camps were liberated. But I don't think many focused on heaven; too much of hell had been lived to allow for God's grace and heaven.

A setback is probably a sign that you need to make some adjustments. If you learn to think that way, all expectations are translated into something positive.

It's quite easy to assume that a multilingual person is stupid. When you know only one language, you become a specialist in that language. You make no mistakes. People listen to you with seriousness, and life is good. But you become a specialist because you are limited in your vocabulary. For example, English speakers use the word 'can' without making any mistakes. They are always confident that the right word is 'can'. As a result, they may be perceived as intelligent people. Because confidence can easily sway the masses. But in the case of a multilingual person, the vocabulary is expanded. When they speak, their brain has to consider the word 'can' in English, 'pouvez' in French, 'kan" in Afrikaans or Dutch, 'puede' in Spanish, and so on. So, while the brain is trying to go through each language memory box, taking into consideration its rules, the speaker could appear blank in their face, slow in the mind, or stuttering when they speak. Then, the society may start to reject them, or to label them as 'stupid.' Unfortunately, many people, especially foreigners, suffer because of this mistaken perception. The message here is that we need to broaden our views about other people. We need to consider them as equally intelligent as we often see ourselves.

To the deep feeling of love and veneration for home and liberty and to the every growing consciousness of high responsibility which warmed the hearts and guided the actions of the true leaders among our Dutch, English, and American forbears this record of their material achievements is proudly, yet humbly, inscribed with the hope and belief that the same spirit will ever continue a chief strength and inspiration to succeeding generations of happy sojourners upon Manhattan Island.

On the working-class, multiethnic Upper West Side alone, Moses bulldozed two stable communities of color. One, along West 98th and 99th Streets, he destroyed as a gift to the builders of a market-rate development called Manhattantown (now Park West Village). At a reunion in 2011, a former resident told the Times, “It was a great neighborhood to live in. I remember playing jacks, eating Icees, playing stickball and dodge ball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out they would open up the fire hydrants.” Said another, “It wasn’t a slum; why tear it down?” The other neighborhood was San Juan Hill, destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center. An African-American and Latino working-class community, San Juan Hill was full of theaters, dance halls, and jazz clubs. In the early 1900s, it was the center of black cultural life in Manhattan, where James P. Johnson wrote the song “The Charleston,” inspired by southern black dockworkers on the Hudson River. Still, it was branded as “blight.” While they fought the city in court, 7,000 families and 800 small businesses were removed and scattered.

I had danced before, but this was the first time I danced out of anger and frustration. It was what my body knew how to do, so I did it. I danced until my body felt like mine again.