“No, the Dutchman is not cold, not insensitive, our people are still full of enthusiasm for what is noble and good. Holland above all! We artists, from Rembrandt to Maris, rave over our country. We find our Holland a delicious beautiful country with its meadows, its beaches, its sea, its domestic interiors, its figures, peasants, farmers, Jews, merchants, everything is similar picturesque as it is all just up for grabs. The most beautifully in the Netherlands is however Amsterdam, that delicious spacious Amsterdam, which is expressing so much and uniting so much in itself.”

— Jozef Israëls

translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls, in Nederlands): Neen, de Nederlander is niet koud, niet ongevoelig, ons volk is nog steeds vol geestdrift voor wat edel en goed is. Holland bovenal! Wij kunstenaars, van Rembrandt tot Maris, dwepen met ons land. Wij vinden ons Holland een heerlijk mooi land met zijn weiden, zijn stranden, zijn zee, zijn binnenhuizen, zijn figuren, boeren, landlieden, joden, kooplieden, alles is even schilderachtig, als maar voor het grijpen. Het mooiste van Nederland is echter Amsterdam, het heerlijk ruim Amsterdam, waarvan zoveel uitgaat en dat zooveel in zich vereenigt.
Quote from Israëls' speech of thanks at the honoring-party for his 70th birthday in Arti et Amacitiae in Amsterdam, Feb 1885; as cited in 'Jozef Israëls in Arti', in Algemeen Hadelsblad, 6 Feb. 1895
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "No, the Dutchman is not cold, not insensitive, our people are still full of enthusiasm for what is noble and good. Holl…" by Jozef Israëls?

Jozef Israëls 33

Dutch painter 1824–1911

Related quotes

“The EU is deeply harmful, it is an anti-democratic monster. I want to prevent it from becoming fatter, from continuing to breathe, from grabbing everything with its paws and from extending its tentacles into all areas of our legislation. In our glorious history, millions have died to ensure that our country remains free. Today, we are simply allowing our right to self-determination to be stolen from us.”

Marine Le Pen (1968) French lawyer and politician

Interview with Marine Le Pen: 'I Don't Want this European Soviet Union', Spiegel (3 June 2014) http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-french-front-national-leader-marine-le-pen-a-972925.html

“After all, though beauty be deceitful, and favour be vain, yet beauty is the most exquisite gift ever lavished by fairies around an infant cradle. Its charm is nameless; it wins us, we know not why — and lingers on our memory, we know not wherefore. Whether in the animate or the inanimate world, it is the cause of our most delicious sensations; it belongs to the imagination, for it calls up within us whatever of poetry may be lurking in the "hidden mines of thought." It is the attribute of all that is most glorious in existence — it is on the azure sky — it clothes the earth as with a garment — it rides triumphant over the purple bosom of the sea. Look within our hearts, it has originated all that is ideal in our nature. Beauty is the shadow flung from heaven on earth — it is the type of a lovelier and more spiritual existence, and the broken and transitory lights that it flings on this our sad and heavy pilgrimage, do but indicate another and a better sphere, where the beautiful will also be the everlasting. The homage involuntarily paid to its mysterious influence is but an unconscious acknowledgment of its divine origin, and its eternal future.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

No.8. The Black Dwarf — ISABEL VERE.
Literary Remains

“[Hindustan] is a wonderful country. Compared with our countries it is a different world; its mountains, rivers, jungles and deserts, its towns, its cultivated lands, its animals and plants, its peoples and their tongues, its rains, and its winds, are all different. …Once the water of Sind is crossed, everything is in the Hindustan way, land, water, tree, rock, people and horde, opinion and custom.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

“It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“We bring good news from a country that has not given up and shall not do so. Good news from a nation that is consolidating its democracy… a country that is building its own social model, its own welfare state by means of new formulas to protect its elders, its pensioners, its children, its young people, its women, the neediest sectors, its working class.”

Nicolás Maduro (1962) 53rd President of Venezuela

President Maduro's speech at the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts), 26 September 2018

“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

"Imaginary Homelands (1992)
Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Context: It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"… human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

“Today we are entering a new era for our country and its people. Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Inaugural speech (1994)
Context: Today we are entering a new era for our country and its people. Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa.
Our country has arrived at a decision. Among all the parties that contested the elections, the overwhelming majority of South Africans have mandated the African National Congress to lead our country into the future. The South Africa we have struggled for, in which all our people, be they African, Coloured, Indian or White, regard themselves as citizens of one nation is at hand.

“There can be no question of selecting in any direction, but of a penetrating the whole cosmic law of rhythms, forces and material that are the real world, from the ugliest to the most beautiful, everything that has character and expression, from the crudest and most brutal to the gentlest and most delicate; everything that speaks to us in its capacity as life. From this it follows that one must know all in order to be able to express all. It is the abolition of the aesthetic principle. We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions; we have never had any. What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life; our interest in life, in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art. We do not even know the laws of aesthetics. That old idea of selection according to the beauty-principle Beautiful — Ugly, like to ethical Noble — Sinful, is dead for us, for whom the beautiful is also ugly and everything ugly is endowed with beauty. Behind the comedy and the tragedy we find only life's dramas uniting both; not in noble heroes and false villains, but people.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Variant translations:
What we possess and what gives us strength is our joy in life, our interest in life in all its amoral facets. This is also the foundation for today's art. We do not even know the aesthetic laws.
We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions; we have never had any. What we have, and what constitutes our strength, is our joy in life, in all of its moral and amoral manifestations.
1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 2, p. 35

“And we do want poetry for its beauty […] Yes, only for its beauty; for its moral power over us—its teaching, comforting, and elevating power all depend on its beauty.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

Source: Don John (1881), Ch. 36, p. 382.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Jozef Israëls 33

Related quotes

Related topics