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Quotes by Belgian Authors
"The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion."
"Then I was president of the Bakelite Corporation from 1910 to 1930."
"In 1893 I founded a chemical company which I ran until 1899."
"Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds."
"The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself."
"Ireland is also quite nice. So is Amsterdam."
"I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men."
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?"
"On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class."
"If the whole world is in a rush and people are out of step with themselves, they fail to catch that quirky aura and that special quality of life that feeds our soul-searching frame of mind and that builds a coveted haven, giving recognition and self-reliance. ['The unbearable heaviness of being']"
"I refuse to be held responsible for bringing back a wave of pasty-faced people into the world."
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
"Some don't want to be happy, inasmuch as they undergo happiness merely as languor and yawning. They are dissatisfied with a bland and vacuous state of glee and, instead, prefer to keep on running like raging bulls through the whims and quirks of life. In reality, their dissatisfaction is their contentment. ['Happiness blowing in the wind']"
"Let's face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me."
"There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way."
"Through dreams and ideas we are seduced to go back to particular places and instances of our past. In the course of the years, these singular moments and spaces of our history very often receive then another color and dimension. Our mind tries however to tame and keep in control the phantoms of times past. If not so, our memory can be subject to an irreversible mutilation. ['The mutilated memory']"
"When time furtively slips like sand through the fingers and our memory becomes tired and lazy, we recognize we are at war. We are at war with forgetfulness. ['The past was her best friend']"
"Comes the tipping point in life, when we decide to a 'stop and search' and our emotional police bring us to a standstill. This allows us to scan all the little details in the spectrum of our being; scour all fuzzy or cryptic elements that are floating around in our mind and restore the fault lines in the cluttered tale of our life. ['The world was somewhere else']"
"All incidents which we experience are warily interpreted and translated in the dark chamber of our mind. They inspire us how to behave, how to think, how to act and prompt our predilections and our way of visualizing the world. The mind opens itself then to welcome the enchantments of life or to tear up destructive thinking patterns. The brain becomes truly a precious resilient partner. ['Camera obscura of the mind']"
"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words."
"If we don't live in the same vibe, it is hard to be aware of each other. When our reading differs from our neighbors' reality, our surroundings may take a range of discordant shades and daily episodes become unrecognizable. But if we endeavor to find out, the "who is who, the "what is what and the "where is Waldo, we might demonstrate our social literacy and connectedness. ['Fish for silence.']"
"Love can crystallize things. When love is in the air, distressing rain can become a wonderful avalanche of shimmering diamonds. Raindrops are transformed into a flood of sparkling crystal pearls. The power of love can convert rain into a multitude of glittering prisms. The mental seduction of love and a boundless illusion, inflamed by a profound uprising emotion, can change any ordinary incident into a radiant, luminous voyage. ['Crystallization under an umbrella']"
"When we feel we have benched ourselves for too long, we must loosen up the unessential, get over our endless cringing and make a bold leap to the glowing stars of our dream. ['Steaming ahead']"
"The crucial point in life is: are we living our 'own' life or simply a life for 'other' people. Are we not playing a role on behalf of some social groups and masquerading for fear of being excluded? ['Quest for the real moment']"
"I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles."
"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete."
"Hope may inspire and inveigle us, but we cannot just live on hope. Certainly, love can be hope, but it is merely a contingency, since it might either mend our life or break our heart. ['Waiting for the smoke signals']"
"We can give happiness a chance: happiness is learnable. Life is a choice and happiness is a question of focusing, hearing and seeing the right things behind the appearances. It is a matter of finding out, differencing worthiness and irrelevance, connectedness and distantness, warmth and aloofness, brightness and dimness. Happiness is the lucky potential to steer friskily along the cliffs of the unknown avoiding the obstacles of narcissism and conceit. [' Happiness blowing in the wind. ']"
"Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical."
"So, then you find yourself in a situation where you have to do things because they're on offer to you, because you don't have much self-respect left. You just can't say no, even to something that you've never done before. You just can't help yourself."
"And if I have a strong point, it's that I like to believe it's not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality."
"Women emerging like aliens in a hesitant future, in a men's world with impervious codes, may feel like dots in an uncharted territory. Discovering the crucial points, which don't line up with the unbearability of reality, may be a key to the right compass in life. ['Terra incognita']"
"The world is a show and the show is a performance of the wealthy, the beautiful and the fortunate. The invulnerable, the matchless and the exclusive live a life like dazzling fish in a scintillating seascape behind glass. Everybody may admire them, but nobody can touch them. ['Keeping up with the Joneses']"
"New York is more than a state of mind. It is the completion of a dream. ['New York at arm's length of desire']"
"We only realize what happiness is about, after it has slammed the door to our inattention; and killing silence has deafened the tunefulness of our life. ['Happy days are back again']"
"Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you're exactly the same."
"Some people look as if they have lost their eagerness and passion. Their aspiration seems to be exhausted and fresh inspiration has abandoned their weary mind. Life has boundlessly given them material welfare, which has fully spoiled them in the end. No energy for longing has been left, as they have reached a twilight zone. The twilight of desire. ['Twilight of desire']"
"To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness."
"In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption."
"I believe very strongly that when it comes to desire, when it comes to attraction, that things are never black and white, things are very much shades of grey."
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