Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 3

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" )
Erik Pevernagie
When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. (“Is that all there is?”)
Erik Pevernagie
Traveling solo is an incredible – life changing – journey, which I can recommend anyone to undertake. It’s the fear of being alone that prevents many people from daring to take the step to go on that journey. But as with many things, within that fear you’ll discover the greatest triumphs.
Jellis Vaes
Distance is but metrics, unmeasurable is the heart
Dimitri Debaene
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")
Erik Pevernagie
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")
Erik Pevernagie
If I can't have your babies, I'll damn sure deliver them!
Frouwkje Denoo
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
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.” )
Erik Pevernagie
We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.
Christian de Duve
Conversation often becomes mere verbal performance and oral horseplay rather than fair-minded communication. (“Juicy rumours “)
Erik Pevernagie
Understand one thing very clearly. Because all this: your time, this world, your life in it and all of those opportunities, they have a deadline.
Jellis Vaes
Much else than liberalization has happened in the nineties (in India)
Jean Drèze
Understanding” may become “misunderstanding”, if no commitment or no responsibilities are assumed, no specific objectives set, no definite expectations met and common values and interests no longer shared. Mutual understanding may then, against all odds, end up in heartache, confusion and bewilderment. ("Mutual understanding" )
Erik Pevernagie
The body often contains emotional truths that words can too easily gloss over.
Esther Perel
Emotion often outwits intelligence, while intuition renders life surprisingly fluent and enjoyable. ("Le ciel c'est l'autre")
Erik Pevernagie
I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations".
May Sarton
If bees die, people will die. Only ignorance never dies! ("Why step out of nature ?")
Erik Pevernagie
Once the dust of volcanic love has settled and the harshness of a new reality has become oppressive, disillusionment may have to be mended, wounds to be healed and emotional fallouts to be taken care of, mindfully ( "Is that all there is ?")
Erik Pevernagie
It may be expedient to take stock of all the affecting pieces that might shatter in the wake of an emotional earthquake, once red flags come up in a committed relationship and an overarching scene has to be fashioned for a recast life experience. ("Waiting for the pieces to fall into place")
Erik Pevernagie
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
Maurice Maeterlinck
This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched.
Maurice Maeterlinck
While we are curling down in our comfort zone, the perverted talents of connectivity-designers drive us surreptitiously into a blind alley of addiction. If, however, we succeed in impeding mobiles' unlimited rule, we may be able to relish the fragrance of the ‘moment’ but also sense the vital spark and spirit of “otherness”. ("Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me")
Erik Pevernagie
Let us use words carefully, because words can betray and kill.( "A gap of silence")
Erik Pevernagie
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
May Sarton
Stolen moments” create a feeling of enjoyment in our “intensive time” awareness. The glow and the intensity of those instants can guide us throughout a whole lifetime. They can expose a second or a third dimension of the daily events and shed an expounding light on all the little details we encounter. ("Stolen moments" )
Erik Pevernagie
One day it may feel as if energy and enthusiasm are quenched, feelings dried up and emotions scorched, love and affection tangled in a harsh and uninviting setting. Nothing seems to grow anymore. No seed. No flowers. No foreseeable hope. No conceivable prospects. Any blossom of expectation seems to have become an illusion and life appears to have come to a standstill. If no seed of loving care is sown in the untilled, abandoned land, no bud can come into flower. Singer Amy Winehouse felt like lying fallow in the ground of a wasteland "with tears dry, dying a hundred times, going back to black" and leaving eventually for a place of ultimate sorrow and heartbreak, for a point of no return. ( “Amour en friche” )
Erik Pevernagie
The pale water which goes away along paths of silence.
Georges Rodenbach
Ieder beest bidt op zijn manier.
Tom Lanoye
When the brain becomes too tired, the mind stops decrypting the perceptions in our mental world and surrenders willingly to the unguarded moments of life.For some time, the safeguards of our thinking pattern weaken and discontinue the decoding of the chips of daily reality.The mind picks the instants which are above suspicion, pure and innocent. ("Uber alle Gipfeln ist Ruh" )
Erik Pevernagie
One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
May Sarton
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”)
Erik Pevernagie
Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ( "Waiting for the pieces to fall into place" )
Erik Pevernagie
Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not"false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, andnothing else, because it is false and misleading.
Paul De Man
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?" )
Erik Pevernagie
That we may not fall short of desire, but let us give way to the unspoken passion hidden in the closet of our discretion. (“Crépuscule du désir”)
Erik Pevernagie
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist
René Magritte
Unexpected clashes between past and present may arouse a surge of bewilderment, but ‘time’ can be a redeemer and heal mental wreckage. Time might prove to be a dependable ally and a reliable coach to find a new inspiring sequel for the future. (“Disruption”)
Erik Pevernagie
If we don’t live in the same vibe, it is hard to be aware of each other. When our reading differs from our neighbors’ reality, our surroundings may take a range of discordant shades and daily episodes become unrecognizable. But if we endeavor to find out, the “who is who”, the “what is what” and the “where is Waldo”, we might demonstrate our social literacy and connectedness. ("Fish for silence.")
Erik Pevernagie
Should a priest reject relativity because it contains no authoritative exposition on the doctrine of the Trinity? Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.
Georges Edouard Lemaître
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
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.")
Erik Pevernagie
Emotional illiterates, who don’t recognize the sound of a broken heart, will never be able to hear the subtle vibrations of love reverberating through the rustling flora of life. ("Love as dizzy as a cathedral”)
Erik Pevernagie
Life can be a misunderstanding, if we are ignorant of the right language or don’t try to learn it. « If lions could speak, we would not understand them. » says Ludwig Wittgenstein. If we make an effort, however, we could manage to understand. ( “ Life was a misunderstanding » )
Erik Pevernagie
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''')
Erik Pevernagie
When love has left us in the lurch and nothing ever strikes a chord anymore, we may come to realize a vacuum of the lost vibrations of happiness and an absence of the ethereal and exalting feel of harmony that we only become aware of, after time passes by and everything has expired. (“Amour en friche”)
Erik Pevernagie
There are women whose love only ends with death.
Georges Rodenbach
In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
May Sarton
The angels that dry our eyes bear the form and the features of all we have said and thought—above all, of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune.
Maurice Maeterlinck
It’s hard to safeguard a genuine life course, when love tips over from endearing care into tedium, through laziness of imagination or loss of interest, and the storyline becomes barren and desolate, insipidly dull, turning into a threadbare act with the same trite modus operandi. “The same procedure as every year, James!” ("Things needing to be changed")
Erik Pevernagie
When the bonfire of love still smolders in the wake of emotional convulsions, seeds of regret and remorse may endlessly linger about on the path of life. ("Taken for a ride)
Erik Pevernagie
Let’s watch out for the unpredictability and the wildcat jumps of contrarian people, whose sole interests are soaring targets at high-speed, at all costs and without any consideration. Perceptive understanding may help us discover the hidden actualities behind the ‘appearances’. .("Mama. Meine Bäume wachsen bis in den Himmel")
Erik Pevernagie
Now is the time to become a myth.
Diane Von Furstenberg
Before we can bring happiness to others, we first must be happy ourselves; nor will happiness abide within us unless we confer it on others. If there be a smile upon our lips, those around us will soon smile too; and our happiness will become the truer and deeper as we see that these others are happy. "It is not seemly that I, who, willingly, have brought sorrow to none, should permit myself to be sad," said Marcus Aurelius, in one of his noblest passages.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Don't waste this life being sad, angry or depressed as you just don't have as much time as you think you do.
Jellis Vaes
If everything must have a cause, of course, this also applies to God; if God can exist in isolation, then why not the universe?
Etienne Vermeersch
Our real life is not the life we live, and we feel that our deepest, nay, our most intimate thoughts are quite apart from ourselves, for we are other than our thoughts and our dreams. And it is only at special moments – it may be by merest accident – that we live our own life. Will the day ever dawn when we shall be what we are? …
Maurice Maeterlinck
Removing yourself from the familiar and opting for the unfamiliar opens up the unknown. And within the unknown there are questions we have never asked ourselves; experiences we have never imagined; lessons we have never had a chance to learn. What we ultimately need when we are stuck within a bubble, is change. Another perspective of seeing and knowing what is possible. Traveling will open that up for you. The world will play its role; all you need to do, is pack your bags and allow it to happen.
Jellis Vaes
So you're getting back together with her? Just like that? Muriel asks."Not 'just like that'..." "How then?" Muriel enjoys playing devil's advocate. "For starters, it will have to be long distance for a while..." She doesn't let up. "For a while? Have you booked the U-Haul already?
Harper Bliss
Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.
Luce Irigaray