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Quotes by Belgian Authors
"Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place."
"In this sport luck and tragedy are only a few hundredths of seconds apart from each other."
"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']"
"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']"
"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."
"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']"
"I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I'd invented it, because it is very true."
"And if I have a strong point, it's that I like to believe it's not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality."
"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']"
"We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world."
"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.']"
"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 ']"
"Postmen have a legendary aura. A ring at the doorbell may inflame a sense of expectation, suspense, secrecy, hazard or even intrigue. Ringing twice may imply a warning that trouble is on the way or an appeal to make the coast clear. Not all mailmen, though, will ring twice and await an eye-catching Lana Turner, whom they can whisper: "With my brains and your looks, we could go places. ['The postman always rings twice']"
"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."
"Some are in tune with the swanky, but not in tune with themselves. Their desire has become the desire of the others. ['Buying now. Dying later']"
"Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions."
"We don't want protectionism at the heart of the European Union."
"My parents had a pub and each Sunday there was an accordionist. They have told me that when I was in my cradle, I already was imitating the gestures of the musician."
"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']"
"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."
"Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out."
"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.']"
"When people become prisoners of daily habits and happen to be hostages of choices, which they made in the past, but which they finally do not actually want, they experience the need to abandon their corporeal prison at a certain time in life. ['Corporeal prison']"
"Rome should sometimes intervene and say this or that is not in conformity with the Catholic faith. Theologians should understand that. Some theologians go too far, for example, reducing the Catholic faith to a universal philosophy."
"I guess the line between being paranoid and being a rock star is smaller than one would expect."
"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."
"A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods."
"In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption."
"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."
"In the past, two colleagues died each season. It was generally accepted this could happen."
"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."
"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']"
"Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live."
"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']"
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