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Quotes by Belgian Authors
!["Many men remain spoiled boys that have never grown up. Women are prepared to raise them and take pain with patience, both as a condescendant contribution to supercilious compassion and as a proof of the eminence of their sense of worth. ['PrAat-A -penser" / "Ready-to-wear thinking']"](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==)
"Many men remain spoiled boys that have never grown up. Women are prepared to raise them and take pain with patience, both as a condescendant contribution to supercilious compassion and as a proof of the eminence of their sense of worth. ['PrAat-A -penser" / "Ready-to-wear thinking']"
"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']"
"Wittgenstein likes to assert: "Whereof we cannot speak we must be silent". But skilfully using our hands and manipulating our thoughts can be plausible options to make ourselves understood. So, if we can't say it, we can show and depict it. Whereof we cannot speak we can paint! ['Happy days are back again']"
"When love has left us in the lurch and nothing ever strikes a chord anymore, we may come to realize a vacuum of the lost vibrations of happiness and an absence of the ethereal and exalting feel of harmony that we only become aware of, after time passes by and everything has expired. ['Amour en friche']"
"When grief impounds our thinking and eats our brains, it seeps through all the cracks of our daily living. Only the soothing wind of comforting words may counter the withering twilight and the frostiness of darkness. ['All the words he always wanted to tell her.']"
"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']"
"Once we get to know where and why the skeletons of the past are buried, we can start wading across our muddled memories into the open plains of a new horizon. ['Going back to yesterday']"
"Espere" in Spanish, is the one word covering two meanings: "waiting" and "hoping". If life, however, offers no expectation or prospect, waiting represents time "wasted. Waiting needs a future. If not, time is condemned to be "killed". In the event that we are lost in a gap of boredom and despair, we are driven back in a vacuum of senselessness and deadlocked in a point of nothingness. We are, so therefore, bound to watch the agony of "time". ['Waiting for a place behind the geraniums ']"
"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']"
"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. ']"
"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."
"My father was a motorsports journalist and a motorbike fan. He gave me my motocross bike."
"The important thing is to take your time and not get stressed."
"We don't want protectionism at the heart of the European Union."
"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."
"Lightness and weightiness are both linked to a philosophy of life. They are choices in life. Heaviness can be the embodiment of a sense of responsibility, the expression of maturity, the result of profound meditation or the emanation of a search for meaning in life. Weightiness, however, may also lead to a feeling of oppression, when it is felt as a burden, an unbearable burden. Then time has come to let loose and things can finally lose their gravity. ['The unbearable heaviness of being']"
"And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders."
"People die from lack of shared empathy and affinity. By establishing social connectedness, we give hope a chance and the other can become heaven. ['Le ciel c'est l'autre']"
"And if I have a strong point, it's that I like to believe it's not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality."
"Since we live in a world of appearances, people are judged by what they seem to be. If the mind can't read the predictable features, it reacts with alarm or aversion. Faces which don't fit in the picture are socially banned. An ugly countenance, a hideous outlook can be considered as a crime and criminals must be inexorably discarded from society. ['Ugly mug offense']"
"When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ['Is that all there is?']"
"If we expect to "know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we may have a hard time seeing the whole picture, since the truth is a willful construction that allows us often merely to "guess. ['Hinter der Mattscheibe']"
"When we allow ourselves to show some patience and take time to listen to the others, we may learn a lot about ourselves. Patience does not endure instant gratification, though, and self-knowledge may take a lifetime. ['I am on my own side, but I can listen ']"
"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete."
"When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. ['Going back to yesterday']"
"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']"
"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']"
"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."
"Is happiness a sort of blissful state of mind or just a kind of surreal propensity? It may be hard to recognize its very nature, if we remain guilelessly confined in a state of woeful unawareness or in a no-man's-land of emotions. In their dogged and obstinate quest for the zenith of happiness, many forget to take pleasure in the small things of everyday and, thus, become disgruntled and depressed instead, which leads them to a mire of gloom. ['C'est quand le bonheur ']"
"Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical."
"Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person."
"My mouth has a tendency to get me into trouble, but because I'm so small and I take on people who are lager than me. If someone punched me, I'd get my drummer beat them up."
"One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication."
"I feel very comfortable with the way I look, and I feel very comfortable with the kind of confusion that it creates in people's minds."
"If you like trekking, go to the Himalayas or Peru. I love those kinds of trips. But it all depends on your own life and what you like and what you expect."
"I'd be interested in finding out if there is a light you walk into, and if you do meet people from your life and walk hand in hand with Jesus. I would hate for my death to be tragic: I'd like to be old when it happens. But hopefully a young death is unlikely."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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