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Quotes by Belgian Authors
"It is the cells which create and maintain in us, during the span of our lives, our will to live and survive, to search and experiment, and to struggle."
"When the shine is wearing off and the underlying cracks of a garlanded lifestyle become painfully apparent, reality may inexorably take its toll and gruelingly reveal the presence of a blatant and hideous gap of irrelevance and vanity. ['Could the milk man be the devil?']"
"We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book."
"There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time."
"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']"
"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."
"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."
"Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds."
"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']"
"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']"
"When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces."
"Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you're exactly the same."
"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."
"I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!"
"I refuse to be held responsible for bringing back a wave of pasty-faced people into the world."
"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."
"Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means."
"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']"
"New York is more than a state of mind. It is the completion of a dream. ['New York at arm's length of desire']"
"The most important thing is to enjoy your life - to be happy - it's all that matters."
"Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once."
"Consumption can be a remedy against boredom and may convey a sense of fictitious power and supremacy, by standing out from the crowd through the extravagance of the expenditure. As it becomes an addiction, however, it might be cured, if the right medication is administered : humbleness and mindful discovery of the others. ['Buying now, dying later']"
"In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption."
"For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ['Another empty room']"
"And if I have a strong point, it's that I like to believe it's not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality."
"The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College."
"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']"
"You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected."
"Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person."
"Nevertheless during these two seasons, Chapman impressed me a lot because he had the faculty to pull himself out of the most critical situations."
"Dwelling among shipwrecked dreams and losing oneself in wishful thinking cannot be a solution to tribulations. Identifying cracks and apprehending the defaults in one's life is essential to find a way to get out of a ghetto and to start a search for a new haven. ['The world was somewhere else']"
"I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people's minds is not in my mind. I just do my thing."
"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete."
"Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out."
"They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors."
"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']"
"Artificial Intelligence leaves no doubt that it wants its audiences to enter a realm of pure fantasy when it identifies one of the last remaining islands of civilization as New Jersey."
"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."
"When perception, thoughtfulness and understanding do meet, we can fashion a range of viable expectations and craft a world of togetherness. ['Morning after']"
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