top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Belgian Authors
"In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption."
"You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying."
"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!"
"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']"
"Like a snake sheds its skin, we are capable of getting rid of assembled habits, creating space to call matters into question. Instead of the Shakespearian " To be or not to be " we could favor " to become or not to become". By "becoming", we challenge the range of possibilities in our life and go beyond the merely "being". We can retreat, then, from the imprisonment of a deadly routine, acquire an identity and develop our personality. ['Man without Qualities']"
"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']"
"We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world."
"They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors."
"Some fail to bear in mind that everyone is sentenced to death. Death is a treacherous virus that strikes randomly. The only truth is that nobody is going to make it out alive. We are all living on probation and our expiry date is indefinite. ['Living on probation']"
"Recognizing a problem may help us to understand and solve a problem. Rather than lying down and selling our sound judgment short, let us appeal to the opulent granary of our memory and explore the green pastures lingering in our mind. ['PrAat-A -penser']"
"There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time."
"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."
"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."
"To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been."
"Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions."
"There's a hell of a lot of freedom in this rock and roll circus... it's where all the freaks go - it's the environment for me."
"The important thing is to take your time and not get stressed."
"He went, ever on the move, with the slow, shuffling step of wandering beggars who are nowhere at home."
"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']"
"By confusing strategy with tactics and mixing up "what and "how, we may have a hard time staying on point. What we want, on the one hand, and "how we want to achieve it, on the other, needs a careful reading and a singular approach. ['When the bar is set too high']"
"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth."
"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?']"
"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."
"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']"
"When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of 'interest' and 'attention', so long as we focus on the 'singular moments' and the 'appealing details' in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ['Lost the global story.']"
"You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected."
"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']"
"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']"
"When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces."
"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 ']"
"International institutions ought to be, as the national ones in democratic countries, established by the peoples and for the peoples."
"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 ']"
"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."
"Placebo is music for outsiders, by outsiders and our gigs are like conventions of outcasts, which is cool."
"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'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."
"A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods."
bottom of page