Dutch Quotes - page 8
England's improvement by sea and land. To outdo the Dutch without fighting. To pay debts without moneys. To set at work all the poor of England with the growth of our own lands. To prevent unnecessary suits of law; with the benefit of a voluntary register. Directions where vast quantities of timber are to be had for the building of ships, with the advantage of making the great rivers of England navigable. Rules to prevent fires in London, and other great cities; with directions how the several companies of handicraftsmen in London may always have cheap bread and drink. By Andrew Yarranton, Gent. London, printed for the author, &c., 1677.
Andrew Yarranton
Van Dyck was proud to be Dutch. Their country might be small... It was the maritime Dutch who had built up a trading empire that was the envy of the nations. Their cities - Amsterdam, Delft, Antwerp - where the rows of tall, gabled houses lined stately canals and waterways, were heavens for artists, scholars and freethinkers from all over Europe, in this, the golden age of Rembrandt and Vermeer.
Rembrandt
Quote in Rembrandt's letter to Constantijn Huygens (Amsterdam, 12 January 1639) on 3 paintings commissioned (in 1635 and started by Rembrandt already in 1635/36) by the imperial court, as cited in Painters on Painting (1963) by Eric Protter, p. 78 / Dutch original text in The Rembrandt Documents, Walter Strauss & Marjon van der Meulen - Abaris Books, New York 1979, p. 161.
Rembrandt
...the intensity of the indignation was in direct proportion to a White's distance from the Indian. On the frontier, the Indian was regarded as a besotted savage; but along the eastern seaboard, where the Spaniards, Dutch, English, and later Americans had long since exterminated all the Indians, philosophers and divines began to defend the Red Man.
Peter Farb
[T]he American dream is still alive and well, thanks: Even the newest taxi driver stumbling over his English grammar knows he can truly become an American. But European Muslims can't become French or Dutch or Italian or German. Even if they qualify for a passport, they remain second-class citizens. On a good day. And they're supposed to take over the continent that's exported more death than any other?
Ralph Peters
With one exception, the following quotes are taken directly from archival footage shot by VRS military cameramen. The arrival of the Bosnian Serb army is covered, as well as their subsequent rush to Potočari, the site of the Dutch base where tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim refugees had taken cover, seeking protection from the United Nations.
Ratko Mladić
But already in his early works, as in the still-life of 1893.. ..there is a tendency towards the static and well-balanced arrangement. He has a preference for painting in atmospheric conditions which tend to efface the individual forms and emphasize the general outline: Mondrian: 'I often sketched by moonlight - cows resting or standing immovable in flat Dutch meadows, or houses with dead, blank windows. I never painted these things romantically'.
Piet Mondrian
He attended Elizabeth Rodman Voorhees College in Vellore, a school run by the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church in America where he was introduced to the Dutch Reform Theology, which emphasized a righteous God, unconditional grace, and election, and which criticized Hinduism as intellectually incoherent and ethically unsound. This is where he encountered what would have appeared to him as crippling assaults on his Hindu sensibilities. He also would have witnessed the positive contributions of the social programs undertaken by the Mission in the name of propagation of the Christian gospel.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Had optical perception not evolved into something more than sensory perception, into super-sensory perception, then the present period would never have had the courage to discover the spiritual in matter. There would have been no fundamental difference between a painting by Picasso [from Picasso's so-called 'abstract' period] and one by Paulus Potter [Dutch painter from the 17th century, famous for his painting of cows].
Theo van Doesburg
I had on the Congo under my orders three hundred men, English, Germans, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgians. I found no difference between them. All did their best according to their means. All were in the course of duty the object of some charge. I examined the charges minutely and always found them to be without foundation. That did not prevent these stories reaching Banana, and from there, Europe.
Henry Morton Stanley
As I learned Dutch I began to formulate an almost impossibly ambitious goal: I would study political science to find out why this society, although it appeared to me to be godless, worked when every society I had lived in, no matter how Muslim it claimed to be, was rotten with corruption, violence, and self-centered guile.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I feel that the continuance of the independence and integrity of the Netherlands depends upon our success in this war... If Germany were to win in this war, she would doubtless retain Belgium, or at least Antwerp, and Dutch independence would be a thing of the past: it never could emerge from the German shadow, and would soon be absorbed. Our victory, on the other hand, would assure not only Dutch integrity, but Dutch independence and freedom.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right.
Baruch Spinoza
![He supported himself by grinding lenses, which was no lowly menial occupation, as it is often presented to have been in romanticizing versions of the philosopher's life, but was rather a craft that drew extensively from Spinoza's serious interest in the science of optics. The quality of his wares was highly valued by other scientists of his day. The important Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Saturn's rings as well as one of its four moons, preferred Spinoza's lenses to all others. "The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish," Huygens wrote to his brother in 1667. The one part of the romantic lens-grinding legend that is sadly true is that the dust from the optical polishing was unhealthy for Spinoza, whose mother and brother had both died young from tuberculosis. He himself succumbed to the disease at the age of forty-four. (Baruch Spinoza)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/95/baruch-spinoza-age-astronomer-1015195.webp)
Spinoza's views on God, religion and society have lost none of their relevance. At a time when Americans seem willing to bargain away their freedoms for security, when politicians talk of banning people of a certain faith from our shores, and when religious zealotry exercises greater influence on matters of law and public policy, Spinoza's philosophy – especially his defence of democracy, liberty, secularity and toleration – has never been more timely. In his distress over the deteriorating political situation in the Dutch Republic, and despite the personal danger he faced, Spinoza did not hesitate to boldly defend the radical Enlightenment values that he, along with many of his compatriots, held dear. In Spinoza we can find inspiration for resistance to oppressive authority and a role model for intellectual opposition to those who, through the encouragement of irrational beliefs and the maintenance of ignorance, try to get citizens to act contrary to their own best interests.
Baruch Spinoza
The Dutch carried vanilla to Indonesia, and the British to India. "Tincture of vanilla” didn't appear in the United States until the 1800s, but when it did, it appealed to the American impatience and aversion to fuss, that sprint through life whose byword is convenience. Europeans use the vanilla bean, luxuriating in its textures, tastes, and aromas, but we preferred it reduced and already bottled. By the nineteenth century, demand flourished, vanilla became synthesized, and the world floated on a mantle of cheap flavoring.
Diane Ackerman
He [Goya] once declared that his real masters were Vélasquez, Rembrandt and Nature. Vélasquez of course he knew intimately being surrounded in Madrid.. .He would have known Rembrandt only through prints, since so little work of the Dutch master's painted work has made its way to Spain.
Francisco Goya
Kolakowski, as we will see, has clearly depicted the religious life and the forms of community constructed by the cultured strata of the Dutch bourgeoisie. Spinoza lives in this world, with a vast network of simple and sociable friendships and correspondences. But for certain determinate strata of the bourgeoisie the sweetness of the cultured and sedate life is accompanied, without any contradiction, by an association with a capitalist Power ('potestas'), expressed in very mature terms. This is the condition of a Dutch bourgeois man. We could say the same thing for the other genius of that age, Rembrandt van Rijn. On his canvases the power of light is concentrated with intensity on the figures of a bourgeois world in terrific expansion. It is a prosaic but very powerful society, which makes poetry without knowing it because it has the force to do so.
Rembrandt
