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Quotes by Belgian Authors
"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."
"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']"
"By assembling in our mind all the consequential facts we have lived through and by reviewing, appraising or sometimes idealizing the numerous key points of the past, authenticity may gradually mutate and actuality decay at last. At that point in time we are to experience a maimed factuality. ['Labyrinth of the mind']"
"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']"
"Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you're exactly the same."
"I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men."
"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."
"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']"
"Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?"
"When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ['Is that all there is?']"
"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete."
"Emotional predictive profiling may help identify contingent fissures in the stature of endangered relationships. Still and all, it might be wise to let the genie out of problematic bottles in the first place, in advance of scouting the causes of surreptitious subliminal convulsions. ['Beware of the neighbor']"
"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']"
"Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical."
"The important thing is to take your time and not get stressed."
"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']"
"New York is more than a state of mind. It is the completion of a dream. ['New York at arm's length of desire']"
"I never thought I'd land in pictures with a face like mine."
"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']"
"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']"
"When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces."
"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."
"Placebo is music for outsiders, by outsiders and our gigs are like conventions of outcasts, which is cool."
"Small bodies, about half a micron in diameter, and later referred to under the name of 'mitochondria' were detected under the light microscope as early as 1894."
"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."
"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!"
"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."
"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."
"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']"
"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."
"You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected."
"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."
"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. ']"
"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."
"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']"
"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?']"
"Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person."
"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."
"Nevertheless during these two seasons, Chapman impressed me a lot because he had the faculty to pull himself out of the most critical situations."
"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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