Raden Adjeng Kartini

“ HURRAH for our native Art and Industry! They are well started now on the road to a splendid future. I cannot tell you how pleased I am. We like to admire our own people and it is so easy to make us proud of them! ”

“ We would not fast and do other things which seemed senseless to us. Every one was in despair; we were in despair, no one could explain the things which were incomprehensible to us. Our God was our conscience, our Hell and our Heaven too was our own conscience; if we did wrong our conscience punished us; if we did good, our conscience rewarded us.
The years came and went; we were called Mahommedans because we had inherited that faith, and we were Mahommedans in name^ no more. God—Allah—was for us a nam—a word—a sound without meaning. ”

“ Life is not a dream. It is cold, sober reality, but even reality does not have to be ugly, unless we make it so.
It is not ugly—it is beautiful. We always have beauty within us. This is the reason that I wish that in education, emphasis were laid upon character forming, and first of all upon the cultivation of strength of will ”

“ The future of our Javanese artists is assured. Heer Zimmerman was in ecstasies over the work that he saw here by the despised brown race: Wood carving, the art of the gold smith, and textile weaving have reached a high degree of excellence. ”

“ That is what one hears all the time. We are now busy writing down everything interesting that we hear from the mouths of the people. There is no word for poetry in our language. We say "bloementaal," and is it not well said. ”