Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 6

When we fail to reflect on the undercurrents of the circumstances of our life, we may have permanent misgivings about the quality of our interpretations. A lucid reading of our acts and our desires helps us to avoid tumbling into a frustrating gap between what we expect and what others expect. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)
Erik Pevernagie
Life can be generous, but leaves us with a trilemma: How can we reconcile three diverse features: ‘I’, 'me' and the 'others'. Since the “I” entails what I want; the “me” what others expect of me and the “others” what others themselves want. The bridges between "individuality", “surroundings” and "otherness" can be abysmal and very often waiting to be restored. (“I am on my own side, but I can listen “ )
Erik Pevernagie
Be good at the depth of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Can there be anything more sad than a girl dying on the day of her first communion, in her new dress. A little bride of death...
Georges Rodenbach
When ideas evaporate, when shapes fade and forms lose their integrity, our imagination can create an outlandish setting and convert everything into a hazy, misty Turner landscape. ("Back garden of a dream")
Erik Pevernagie
In a lifeworld, where we can be what we are, and not what people expect us to be, we can escape a blank and void existence, which is linked to wrecking ennui. Boredom often slips into revulsion and nausea, for not being able to find an identity and not succeeding in acquiring individuality with the quality of authenticity. ("Like a frozen image")
Erik Pevernagie
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
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")
Erik Pevernagie
To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.
Raoul Vaneigem
Many buy gadgets they don’t really need, with money they don’t have, for people they don’t actually care for, while infringing their corporeal and financial capacities, in order to pay doctors and psychiatrists.( "Keeping up with the Joneses")
Erik Pevernagie
An insipid voice message or an incongruent emergence from the “other” world may disrupt our whole thinking system. If we are not able to deal with the fragmentation of our self and assess the deconstruction of our identity, a corny incident could easily capsize our being. A misinterpretation of facts and expectations may perturb our awareness and unsettle our perception. When “I” and “me” don’t get along very well, the road to oneness may be very often bumpy. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)
Erik Pevernagie
...I've had a lot of time to think about this, and yes, we could go down your route. The difficult, painful one, because, let's face it, Ellie, you're a fan of the hard way through. Or, we could, slowly but surely, try to forgive each other for all the mistakes we've made and the hurt we've caused each other. None of us sitting here is innocent...
Harper Bliss
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")
Erik Pevernagie
There may be human joy in doing good with definite purpose, but they who do good expecting nothing in return know a joy that is divine.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Everyday objects shriek aloud.
René Magritte
As light splinters into darkness, new thoughts may take over in the mind and allow upbeat views to gain power. Thus and so, thoughtfulness readily opens a blistering sky in the faltering shadow of unawareness. ("Absence of Desire")
Erik Pevernagie
The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.
Raoul Vaneigem
Attitude is everything.
Diane Von Furstenberg
The secret does not lie in the perfection of your path, but in recognizing its imperfection.
Krist Pauwels
When scorching passion only leaves ashes of unfulfilled dreams, hope may entice the sprinkling magic of our imagination into livening up the footlights on a new stage of life. ("Taken for a ride")
Erik Pevernagie
When our mind is in shambles and we dare to reflect on the story of our life, we may discover, in the stream of our thoughts, the fault line between what we have underfelt and what we have overthought on our way. (“Axel Red”)
Erik Pevernagie
What does myself now say to me?"Open the door of Mystery.
May Sarton
Silence can be breathing space and spawn release and wellness in a time of appalling inflation of words. But silence may be intolerably screaming, if it means absence of communication, deficiency in friendship and emotional deficit. (« A gap of silence”)
Erik Pevernagie
Character. Intelligence. Strength. Style. That makes beauty.
Diane Von Furstenberg
Language is accurate: you run for your life. If you are dying, leave. If you are suffering, move. There is no other law, only movement.
Amélie Nothomb
Just as our parents' souls revolted against God, their bodies revolted against their souls, to which they had been subject. And they realized 'that they were naked.
Alice von Hildebrand
Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown, cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole.
Esther Perel
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always she had to admit interesting.
May Sarton
If the context is lost and merely bits and pieces remain from a scattered existence, only the connection of anchor points may reinstate a distorted mental balance in an upset life story. ("Lost the global story." )
Erik Pevernagie
It is so simple and easy to hate and so grueling and hard to love, when the emotional “love forever”- revelation has become a crumbling “love never, ever again”- crack-up. There is no route back to a paradise lost, when the bonds of trust have, irrevocably, been blasted. ("Another empty room")
Erik Pevernagie
government is legitimate not so much because it represents the 'general will', but because its policies are, ideally and counterfactually, the result of the public deliberation of all who are concerned by the decision
Frédéric Vandenberghe
Don't confuse love with the fear of being lonely...
Erik Tanghe
Pigs should not make friends with butchers. One must choose one's friends wisely.
Erik Pevernagie
No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?
Raoul Vaneigem
And indeed, if we had only the courage to listen to the simplest, the nearest, most pressing voice of our conscience, and be deaf to all else, it were doubtless our solitary duty to relieve the suffering about us to the greatest extent in our power.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Let’s not wait until the light fades into irreparable loss, but let’s stay in the loop and pursue the momentous flow of daily little wonders, since life kindly tenders us gorgeous bouquets of sparkling colors, telling signs and rousing episodes. (“Côté cour…Côté jardin”)
Erik Pevernagie
We believe we have dived down to the most unfathomable depths, and when we reappear on the surface, the drop of water that glistens on our trembling finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We believe we have discovered a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the light of day, and the gems we have brought are false – mere pieces of glass – and yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly, in the darkness!
Maurice Maeterlinck
0 God assist our side: at least avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me.
Prince Leopold
When our consciousness has become a haven of illusions, our mind may have a hard time to fight the maze in our thinking. Only anchor points from our past and the innocence of our childhood might give back the core of what we are. (“Not without the past”)
Erik Pevernagie
It may be prodigious, but it's all Greek to me!
Hergé
Gratitude, the ability to count your blessings, is the ultimate way to connect with the heart.
Baptist de Pape
For inside all the weakness of old age the spirit God knows is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
The world in which we now live is a world whose outlook is so distorted that we absolutize what is relative (money-making, power, success) and relativize what is absolute (truth, moral values, and God).
Alice von Hildebrand
Each day and the living of it has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
May Sarton
We are not wrong, perhaps, to be heedful of justice in the midst of a universe that heeds not at all; as the bee is not wrong to make honey in a world that itself can make none. But we are wrong to desire an external justice, since we know that it does not exist. Let that which is in us suffice. All is for ever being weighed and judged in our soul. It is we who shall judge ourselves; or rather, our happiness is our judge.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Is heaven a place in the sky?Heaven is what we wear in our heart and in our mind. ( “Is heaven a place in the sky?” )
Erik Pevernagie
Jealousy appears to be a redoubtable pitfall for love, on the toll road of self-absorption and unshareability. When love has to remain cloistered and ostentatiously exclusionary, envy may show its pernicious power, cause wounding harms and unchain emotional twisters. ("Why has Shé got stars in the sky?")
Erik Pevernagie
When we take the time to break free from the tyranny of Time and learn to listen to the sound of unspoken words, we discern the hot air behind the frenzy of the wheeling and dealing around. (“Wheeling and dealing »)
Erik Pevernagie
The Enlightenment may have made its most lasting impact in the way we live and think today through its social history. Our institutions and laws, our conception of the state, and our political sensitivity all stem from Enlightenment ideas… Remarkably enough, at the center of these ideas stands the age-old concept of natural law. Much if the Enlightenment’s innovation in in political theory may be traced to a change in the interpretation of that concept.
Louis Dupré
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
Life is a risk.
Diane Von Furstenberg
Animals and nature are known to open our hearts, calm us, and reduce blood pressure and stress.
Baptist de Pape
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
If we don’t manage to connect the dots anymore and the power of our imagination is creaking at the seams, in a world of withering expectations, we have to rewrite the script of our life. ("Into a new life")
Erik Pevernagie
Hope always comes after evil has done its work. We cannot keep living on hope, though. (Box of Pandora)
Erik Pevernagie
We suffer but little from suffering itself; but from the manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring. We are wrong in believing that it comes from without. For indeed we create it within us, out of our very substance.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The dialectic case of the 'things we do', the 'things we have done' and the 'things we are going to do' has been haunting present and earlier generations. For ages people have been confronted with the soul-searching question how should I interpret the past and how do I move forward. Linguistic sayings, which were inherited from century to century, gave us a good deal of remarkable advice and moral guidance in this field : " Do what is right and let come what come may ", " Do well and fear not ", " Do well and dread no shame ".Erik Pevernagie, Never looking back again
Erik Pevernagie
I’ve never met a woman who is not strong, but sometimes they don’t let it out. Then there’s a tragedy, and then all of a sudden that strength comes. My message is let the strength come out before the tragedy.
Diane Von Furstenberg
Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.
Gustave de Molinari
I find great happiness in my relationships with old friends, living mirrors that reflect histories of laughter and sorrow, triumphs and failures, births and deaths, on both sides.
Diane Von Furstenberg