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Quotes by Dutch Authors
"A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie."
"But, then again, I had to stop because there was too much pain or too much trouble. After I retired I still had one more elbow surgery just to be able to do normal things."
"If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen."
"The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges."
"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."
"The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self."
"The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic that to love others."
"By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade."
"It is not the least anxiety that we have so little powder and lead on hand."
"It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city."
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
"Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism."
"I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection."
"It's never been important to be a huge star or to have some breakout role. If you're the lead, you get a lot more screen time and you get a lot more chances to develop that character more thoroughly than you would if you do it in a little supporting part."
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
"One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity."
"Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning."
"According to well-known electrodynamic laws, an electron moving in a magnetic field is acted upon by a force which runs perpendicular to the direction of motion of the electron and to the direction of the magnetic field, and whose magnitude is easily determined."
"What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?"
"Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders."
"Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin."
"Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed."
"For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
"The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event."
"Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad."
"Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning."
"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."
"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand."
"He who allows oppression shares the crime."
"The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death."
"Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another."
"Speed is often confused with insight. When I start running earlier than the others, I appear faster."
"When the principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then the battle is your calling, and peace has become sin. You must at the price of dearest peace lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith."
"I am sustained by the tranquility of an upright and loyal heart."
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