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Quotes by Belgian Authors

"The fact that I am still alive after 100,000 laps is my championship."


"Recollection builds up our personality. Our individuality is based on all the little pieces we assembled in the past. ['The past was her best friend']"

"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

"If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough."

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but clones kind of get it wrong because we are promoting individuality and being proud of being yourself."


"Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness."

"How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words."

"Harbour Island in the Bahamas is beautiful, with turquoise water and pink sand."

"The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."

"Where do you find the strength to brave a barrage of enemy fire and to bring your wounded friends to safety at great risk to your own life? Conviction."

"I prepared my intervention the night before I spoke. As it happened, there were about 44 cardinals who wished to speak but could not because there was not enough time. I was one of the last to speak."

"I travel in so many different ways; I travel high, I rough it... it all depends on who I travel with."

"Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign of life."

"I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience."

"Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it."

"As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others."

"When someone is HIV-positive and his partner says, I want to have sexual relations with you, he doesn't have to do that. But when he does, he has to use a condom."

"The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have an uneven development of class activity and an uneven development of class consciousness in the working class."

"There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don't need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain."

"For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men."

"Man has now become an adjunct to perfect and carry forward these conquests."

"We possess only the happiness we are able to understand."

"Furthermore, there is absolutely no contradiction between the separate organizations of revolutionary vanguard militants and their participation in the mass organizations of the working class."

"The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class."

"You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness."

"What fascinated me, it was not the glory, but the contact with the public."

"The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion."


"Life can be a misunderstanding, if we are ignorant of the right language or don't try to learn it. — If lions could speak, we would not understand them. — says Ludwig Wittgenstein. If we make an effort, however, we could manage to understand. ['Life was a misunderstanding']"

"The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself."

"In 1893 I founded a chemical company which I ran until 1899."
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