Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 9

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
May Sarton
Unless we close our eyes we are always deceived.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Problems, struggles, difficulties, whatever you want to call them, are normal. In fact, each and every person you see walking on the street, sitting in the metro, working out at the gym, wherever, is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Problems are the most human thing about being a human, and are one of the few things that each and every one of us has in common.
Jellis Vaes
War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.
Gustave de Molinari
A fleeting moment can become an eternity. From a past encounter everything may disappear in the dungeon of forgetfulness. A few furtive flashes or innocent twinkles can survive, though. Some immaterial details may remain marked in our memory, forever. A significant look, a salient colour or a unforeseen gesture may abide, indelibly engraved in our mind. ( "Girl in blue" )
Erik Pevernagie
And yet that's the best way to watch television actively: with your eyes closed.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
It turns out that there are many powers of the heart--among them intuition, intention, gratitude, forgiveness, resilience, and, of course, love.
Baptist de Pape
Definitions and meanings change all the time. Truth and reality are very volatile, indefinite, multi layered and sometimes very paradoxical. That’s why it is very fiddly to make a set definition for the phenomena of our daily life. ( " Did not expect it would ever happen, there" )
Erik Pevernagie
For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings - withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment - but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one's torture enjoying.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Possessing faith is not convenient. You still have to live it.
Francoise Mallet-Joris
It would take a while before the postmodern Narcissus perceived the ruins of society behind the emptiness of his mirror.
Paul Verhaeghe
Emotion is ‘recognition’. When treasured moments are identified in the jungle of our personal history during a visual or aural encounter, we capture magic sparks from our past, arousing flashes of insight and revealing an inner flare. These instants of recognition may kindle enthralling emotion and fulfilling inspiration. (“Those journeys of love”)
Erik Pevernagie
I honestly think that depression, unhappiness or the feeling of emptiness is more a lack of amazement about life than anything else.
Jellis Vaes
Power and glory are two dialectic energies working in common ground. Taking a glimpse of the meandering under swell of glory in the shade of power, can be very inspiring and illuminating. ("The power and the glory" )
Erik Pevernagie
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The crucial point in life is: are we living our 'own' life or simply a life for 'other' people. Are we not playing a role on behalf of some social groups and masquerading for fear of being excluded? ( "Quest for the real moment" )
Erik Pevernagie
‎I believe very strongly that when it comes to desire, when it comes to attraction, that things are never black and white, things are very much shades of grey.
Brian Molko
If you know why you are here, if you have a reason – a purpose, you know why you are born – you know why you are alive and you will feel alive. Purpose is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in the world to have.
Jellis Vaes
I’m in love with you,” I whispered, searching her eyes. i looked very pale and very scared, and a little…hopeful.
Dries Wils
Many politicians are tantalizing storytellers, as they mix facts with fiction, grab our emotion and tell things, they want us to believe. Their factoids are unremittingly reiterated, take a life on their own and in the end become the very truth… until the bubble bursts.("What after bowling alone?" )
Erik Pevernagie
I have done what I could do in life and if I could not do better I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Love is illiterate. Whether we write it big or small, we cannot read it. We might only guess. ( "I seek you" )
Erik Pevernagie
Death has come and atoned for all. I have no grievance against the soul of the man before me. Instinctively do I recognise that it soars high above the gravest faults and the cruellest wrongs (and how admirable and full of significance is this instinct!). If there linger still a regret within me, it is not that I am unable to inflict suffering in my turn, but it is perhaps that my love was not great enough and that my forgiveness has come too late. …
Maurice Maeterlinck
When some claim demarcation and “regulation”, others fancy “deregulation”, preferring foxes guarding the henhouse or chicken yards with free chickens and free foxes. Friend or foe, hen or fox, anyone can have a go. (“This far”)
Erik Pevernagie
Carezza, like Tantra, considers the sex act to be a true feast of love, and ejaculation is seen as a clumsy, crude incident-something quite banal which kills sexual desire. The man who, a few minutes before was seized by a frantic sexual desire, changes as soon as he has ejaculated and turns away from his wife, damaging her in her self-respect and her love as well.
André Van Lysebeth
Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves of night and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Love assumes expectation and hope. All actors of the hazardous pursuit of love eagerly look forward to passing a significant cape without injuries or aching scratches: "the Cape of good Hope". ( " Those journeys of love" )
Erik Pevernagie
Face au questionnement sur l'existence de Dieu, se présentent trois types d'individus honnêtes, le croyant qui dit: «Je ne sais pas mais je crois que oui», l'athée qui dit: «Je ne sais pas mais je crois que non», l'indifférent qui dit : «Je ne sais pas et je m'en moque.»L'escroquerie commence chez celui qui clame: «Je sais !» Qu'il affirme : «Je sais que Dieu existe» ou «Je sais que Dieu n'existe pas», il outrepasse les pouvoirs de la raison, il vire à l'intégrisme ... En notre siècle où, comme jadis, on tue au nom de Dieu, il importe de ne pas amalgamer les croyants et les imposteurs : les amis de Dieu restent ceux qui le cherchent, pas ceux qui parlent à Sa place en prétendant L'avoir trouvé.
Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Wittgenstein likes to assert: "Whereof we cannot speak we must be silent". But skilfully using our hands and manipulating our thoughts can be plausible options to make ourselves understood. So, if we can’t say it, we can show and depict it. Whereof we cannot speak we can paint! ("Happy days are back again")
Erik Pevernagie
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton
While many find the new clothes of the emperor magnificent, some dare to say out loud, he is simply naked. If the clear sighted are constrained by the credulous and when the “followers” are browbeating the "knowers", the cat is among the pigeons and the age of obscuration is under way. Obviously "something wicked this way comes…" ("His master's voice" )
Erik Pevernagie
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.
May Sarton
May it not be the supreme aim of life thus to bring to birth the inexplicable within ourselves; and do we know how much we add to ourselves when we awake something of the incomprehensible that slumbers in every corner? Here you have awakened love which will not fall asleep again. … nothing can ever separate two souls which, for an instant, ‘have been good together.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Let us keep enough money to enjoy each breath we take, but definitely not too much, if we don’t want to spoil the fragrance of our dreams and the poem of life.
Erik Pevernagie
The more completely you can be yourself, the more fully and consciously you participate in the world.
Krist Pauwels
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
Some feel lucky, if they haven't got to be happy, as they don’t like their frame of mind to be unravelled and prefer to be left well enough alone. ( "C’est quand le bonheur ?" )
Erik Pevernagie
What man is there that does not laboriously though all unconsciously himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. ( " Another empty room" )
Erik Pevernagie
Reality is not what we see, reality is what we think we see.
Erik Pevernagie
life is either a reproducible, almost commonplace manifestation of matter, given certain conditions, or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in between.
Christian de Duve
Savez-vous que c'est à cause de cette recherche de ce que j'appellerais les compensations, cette rechercher d'un bonheur malgré tout, que naissent les manies et, souvent, les déséquilibres.
Georges Simenon
That all plants immediately and substantially stem from the element water alone I have learnt from the following experiment. I took an earthern vessel in which I placed two hundred pounds of earth dried in an oven, and watered with rain water. I planted in it a willow tree weighing five pounds. Five years later it had developed a tree weighing one hundred and sixty-nine pounds and about three ounces. Nothing but rain (or distilled water) had been added. The large vessel was placed in earth and covered by an iron lid with a tin-surface that was pierced with many holes. I have not weighed the leaves that came off in the four autumn seasons. Finally I dried the earth in the vessel again and found the same two hundred pounds of it diminished by about two ounces. Hence one hundred and sixty-four pounds of wood, bark and roots had come up from water alone.
Jan Baptist van Helmont