Erik Pevernagie Quotes

When we stake a claim to the needs and wants of our life, we may easily fail to live up to the standards of others. Empathy and connectedness, however, might bridge the gap, by stirring our consciousness of the sensitive queries and by assessing the intricate framework of our surroundings with their countless, prickly nitty-gritties. ("Absence of Desire")

When illness and old age are no longer indulgent and strength is irrevocably seeping away, brightness fades insidiously away from the light of the day and time only betrays reckless evanescence. (“Into a new life”)

Woe betides anyone getting in the way of people that keep on muddying the waters, throwing up smoke screens and clouding issues, so as to conceal their dubious motivations. ("Could the milkman be the devil?")

Better thinking out loud than suffocating from frustration. ("The upper lip must never tremble" )

If thinking and reason crack under pressure of emotional convulsions or when commissioned facts are resulting from fibs and fake constructions, truth may be in great peril. ( ”Blame storming”)

Art can blow us out of our pigeon hole. In deafness it may shout or scream, in blindness it may arrest our attention, in numbness it may shake up our mind. If we don’t sense anything at all and take everything for granted, art can kick us in the ass, give a conscience and make us aware. ("When is Art?")

Relationships may become wrecked by a quirky syndrome: the “Ain't broke, don't fix”-syndrome. When there is no interaction in the neural network and no breakthrough into the mind but only a shallow skin experience, living together might be very torturous. If a heartfelt bond has not been molded, nothing can be broken and thus nothing needs to be fixed. (“I wonder what went wrong.”)

The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. (“Into a new life”)

Is love just a butterfly? Love can tell us so many things about the deep waters of our inner self and the secrecy in the hidden brushwood of our emotions. ("Alpha and Omega")

When perception, thoughtfulness and understanding do meet, we can fashion a range of viable expectations and craft a world of togetherness. ("Morning after")

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. ("Prêt-à-penser" / "Ready-to-wear thinking")

Shrink wrapped ideas and prefabricated thoughts are a result of sloth and laziness. ("Prêt-à-penser")

A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" )

Recollection builds up our personality. Our individuality is based on all the little pieces we assembled in the past. ("The past was her best friend")

Love is hope and expectation. If many want to pencil it in, some don’t dare to ink it in, because love also means mystery and enigma. ( " Love as dizzy as a cathedral")

Let us speak less and say more. ( “Words flew away like birds” )

When questioning ourselves, we must identify, where we are heading to. Do we prefer our life to remain untitled. Will we stand bare and naked without dressing any expectations or do we decide to interact with the world around. Will we play a part on the stage of life or do we choose to remain simply a chapter without heading, an episode without caption, an untitled interval. ("Life untitled" )

We perceive the world through the rear window of life, observe all the puzzles and little pieces of our existence and assemble them in a comprehensive pattern. This allows us to reassess and evaluate our world view. ( "Waiting for the pieces to fall into place" )

By looking for the unexpected and discerning the surreptitious features in the scenery within us, we apprehend our personality, find out our identity and learn how to cultivate it. Taking care of our fingerprints will be an enduring endeavor. ( "Looking for the unexpected" )

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" )

In the rough-and-tumble play of politics, dog-whistle messages are copiously dispatched over the heads of the grassroots people that cannot see the writing on the wall and have to remain in the cold, like dumb puppets on a string. ("What after bowling alone?" )

If we really want to know, who we are and recognize our identity, we have to find out the identity of the others. By making friends with the others, we are able to make friends with ourselves. At that moment, we can sense how everything falls into place. ( “ Steps in the unknown" )

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")

Happiness is good management of expectations and good management means making order and assembling the contingent elements of the "do's'" and the "don'ts", the "maybe yes'" and the "maybe not's". When we really want to live in agreement with ourselves and find peace with the surrounding world, good management is liberating. ( " Expectations " )

Some are condemned to remain mere “clock and smart phone watchers”, inasmuch as they are not able to read and interpret the lines of their life or don't even treasure the enchantment of daily captivating moments. If we are not prepared to give some personal time to social time, we walk like blind men through gloomy alleys of our existence. ( " Please. Just a bit of a chat " )

In the beginning was the word and the word was love and love was imagination. When love takes us through the sun-dappled garden of our imagination, no stalking horses can perturb the rainbow in our mind or fade out its bright colors reflecting in the blue sky of our memory. ("Alpha and Omega")

When we feel fractured, redundant and nonessential, only bouncing back from lowliness may brighten up the story of our life. In this endeavor, “otherness” might lend a helping hand in making the road less parching. (“He did not know that she knew”)

People who don’t construe their life and don’t frame their own tale, stay on the sidelines, remain only an act without a story and turn into an "empty box". Out-of-the-box thinking and inventiveness remains then merely wishfull thinking. ( "Everybody his story" )

Memory may be pig-headed and want us to follow its whims along the blips and dips of our time line. ( "All the words he always wanted to tell her.")

The day we decide to drop the flimsy makeshift scenarios in our cluttered mind and eschew the ‘alleluias’ of self-importance, life can become genuine, lucid and graceful, like a flow of wellness in the glow of a new morning. ("Words flew away like birds")

What a wonderful world it could be, when spiritual factions would choose to read sacred writings as colorful metaphors and not as bloody declarations of war. (“Is heaven a place in the sky?”)

The grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. Many politicians promise green, green grass by blending niceties with delusion and by using alluring confidence tricks. They voice attractive tales and tell things, people like to hear. But the post-factual grassland often appears to be parched and barren. ("The grass was greener over there")

Regret and remorse” is a dialectic issue about what has been done, about what should have been done and about what should not have been done. ( “Island of regret. Island of remorse” )

When we are looking for the unexpected, we are not only looking for the unexpected in ourselves, but we are also curious about the unexpected in the behavior of the others. So as to know the others, we have got to learn how and where they differ from us. By understanding this, we are able to establish an uplifting link with otherness. ( "Looking for the unexpected" )

If the whole world is in a rush and people are out of step with themselves, they fail to catch that quirky aura and that special quality of life that feeds our soul-searching frame of mind and that builds a coveted haven, giving recognition and self-reliance. ("The unbearable heaviness of being”)

Only if we transvalue the plain-vanilla standards of our life, we may bring back things to light and sense the lies behind perceptions. ("Behind the frosted glass")

Being caught up in a game without having a clue about the rules, may be extremely maddening and frustrating. Liberty may be so frightening and grueling, that many don’t conceal their passion for rules and regulations, since these can give a relieving feeling of security and protection. ("When forgetting the rules of the game" )

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" )

Liberty is only possible on the condition of regularity. We cannot be free and play the game of life without abiding to the rules, but the rules have to be adapted constantly in line with our experiences and the events we encounter. ( “If he doesn't play ball “ )

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 words have vanished, when daily habits have extinguished emotional exchange, only killing silence remains and indifference takes over. ( "Words had disappeared" )

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. ("Prêt-à-penser")

Unfailing friends are essential, when ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ are wrangling in our daily living, and our presence is rampaged by murk and woe, while passion and lust for life are trampled. Reliable allies can shore us up and since we are our best ally, we first have got to make sure we get along well with ourselves. ("Being my best friend”).

If reshaping a life style boils down to pretending and dwindling into a world of make-believe, living may turn into a schizophrenic merry-go-round and the real self might be crunched and munched on, piece by piece. (“He did not know that she knew”)

Some seem to be desynchronized in their relationships. They feel oppressed, because they cannot move forward together and at the same pace. Their thinking is often incongruent, their motivation disparate. The phone could be a mediator, as it creates an impression to be a perfect reliable friend. However, in the end, it causes rather a sense of isolation, since it divides more than it unites. Eventually it appears not to be such a good friend but only a ghost friend. ( "Kein Schwein ruft mich an" )

Some people live disconnected, in a world of their own. Their wishful thinking represents their sole veracity. But when the mirror smashes the reflection of their delusion, it will not falter to talk back. ( "The day the mirror was talking back" )

When relationships lose their pitch through lack of interest and become stale or unbearable through enduring stealthy backbiting, the emotional house of cards is under attack. A painstaking reshuffle, however, may brand a new choice of life and create energy for positive thinking, whereas remaining bogged down in dispiriting situations and staying clogged up with immaterial hassle may only spawn forlorn deadlocks.. ("Mes cliques et mes claques")

When we are smitten, we await love to be “remontant” and to be blooming over and over again”, like remontant roses, with blossoms scenting through all the seasons of life. Passion and patience are to be good allies, though.

When we are able to break free from the imprisonment of our little, small self-thinking and dare to face the essence of life, we recognize we are never at home with ourselves. We are always on the road. By challenging the unknown and the unidentified we are capable of opening our skyline. ("Transcendental journey")

If we dare to dream, we must dare to wake up. When we come to rub our eyes wide open and face up to realness, we can clear our vision and curb a whirlwind of bewilderment that might break our mind apart, once fantasy wrangles with reality and our awareness denies the true colors of facts. ("Behind the frosted glass”)

We are what we remember. If we lose our memory, we lose our identity and our identity is the accumulation of our experiences. When we walk down the memory lane, it can be unconsciously, willingly, selectively, impetuously or sometimes grudgingly. By following our stream of consciousness we look for lost time and things past. Some reminiscences become anchor points that can take another scope with the wisdom of hindsight. ("Walking down the memory lane" )

Life is merely a series of moments and is in fact an unflinching serial killer, since it kills steadily each moment one after the other. Memory is the only survivor. (“Just for a moment”)

Things as they appear every day and as they are engraved in our memory, facts and occurrences as they are perceived by senses, create an intricate labyrinth in the mind. The way how things are experienced in our environment and how they react in the arsenal of our imagination, creates a torrent of inspiring ideas that flood the speedy highways of our brains. ( " Labyrinth of the mind " )

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” )

When time furtively slips like sand through the fingers and our memory becomes tired and lazy, we recognize we are at war. We are at war with forgetfulness. ("The past was her best friend" )

When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. (“Is that all there is?”)

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")

Happiness is an undercurrent of sensitivity and leads a surreptitious life: it is an internal eventuality. We can feel it in stillness and it stands the test of time. Joy is an eruption of cheerful moments and we want to express it: it is an external eventuality. We might shout it out, as it conveys a dynamic of fleeting instants. Joy gives voice to “en-joy-ment”. ("The grass was greener over there")

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" )

A living together becomes a living apart, when the pineal gland has not been able to create a luster of spiritual togetherness and emotional attachment. (“I wonder what went wrong.” )