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Quotes by Belgian Authors
"Ireland is also quite nice. So is Amsterdam."
"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."
"I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing 'Funny Face' when I couldn't sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it."
"I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it."
"Let's face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me."
"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?"
"When people's parallel truth collides with their real truth, they may have a hard time in subduing all the fanciful items and characters of their invented world. ['The day the mirror was talking back']"
"Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth's great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia."
"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."
"You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying."
"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."
"I never thought I'd land in pictures with a face like mine."
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
"In 1893 I founded a chemical company which I ran until 1899."
"In a lifeworld, where we can be what we are, and not what people expect us to be, we can escape a blank and void existence, which is linked to wrecking ennui. Boredom often slips into revulsion and nausea, for not being able to find an identity and not succeeding in acquiring individuality with the quality of authenticity. ['Like a frozen image']"
"Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing."
"There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time."
"International institutions ought to be, as the national ones in democratic countries, established by the peoples and for the peoples."
"Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?"
"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']"
"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']"
"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']"
"In this kind of situation, we tend to cling to his convictions, we believe that, by magic, we are going to recover. Then we agree to drive less good cars and we are fatally more exposed. It is what finally happened to me with Ensign."
"Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds."
"Accusations are made directly to Rome about theologians from persons who are not theologians. Some of these accusations are anonymous. The local bishop should be the one to relate to theologians to determine orthodoxy."
"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words."
"The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class."
"A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ['Promised me a breeze of freedom']"
"Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves."
"Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence."
"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']"
"The existence is a tremendous curiosity, with in the course of the years, the discovery of yourself in your inmost evolutions. With the age you feel better than you are, what you represent. Which means a little at the planet's scale."
"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."
"Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical."
"You can be in Tokyo or Alberta at four in the morning in your hotel and you can still practice if you feel like it. A trombone cannot do that at four in the morning."
"Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not."
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
"And if I have a strong point, it's that I like to believe it's not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality."
"The problem for Rome, then, is how and when the intervention should be done with a sense of the possibility of going too far in limiting the freedom of theologians. This is not an easy time - neither for Rome nor for the theologians."
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