Quotes by Belgian Authors

The sun finally died in beauty, flinging out its crimson flames, which cast their reflection on the faces of passers-by, giving them a strangely feverish look. The darkness of the trees became deeper. You could hear the Seine flowing. Sounds carried farther, and people in their beds could feel, as they did every night, the vibration of the ground as buses rolled past.
Georges Simenon
The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still.In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat.Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis.Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener.A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls.People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone.Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica.Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment.The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet.The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless.The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers.The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out.And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis.He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him.The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out:‘Monsieur Bouvet!
Georges Simenon
I've never had any rights in this country and I'm happy to renounce any I'm supposed to have. That way they can't bother me.
Dimitri Verhulst
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”)
Erik Pevernagie
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")
Erik Pevernagie
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
Georges Simenon
Excellence costs a great deal.
May Sarton
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
Maurice Maeterlinck
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
May Sarton
0 God assist our side: at least avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me.
Prince Leopold
You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.
Maurice Maeterlinck
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The future is a world limited by ourselves-in it we discover only what concerns us.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
For inside all the weakness of old age the spirit God knows is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton
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
Life is a risk.
Diane Von Furstenberg
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.
May Sarton
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
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
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton
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
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.
May Sarton
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
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
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.
L. J. Cardinal Suenens
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
When we lose one we love our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
May Sarton
Possessing faith is not convenient. You still have to live it.
Francoise Mallet-Joris
Life comes in clusters clusters of solitude then clusters when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
If the word frankly or sincerely is not uttered in the first ten minutes-or let us speak openly-then you are not in the presence of a genuine businessman and he will certainly go bankrupt.
Francoise Mallet-Joris
Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
L. J. Cardinal Suenens
All those who prefer peace to power, and happiness to glory should thank the colonized people for their civilizing mission. By liberating themselves, they made Europeans more modest, less racist, and more human. Let us hope that the process continues and that the Americans are obliged to follow the same course. When one’s own cause is unjust, defeat can be liberating.
Jean Bricmont
Fallujah was a Guernica with no Picasso. A city of 300,000 was deprived of water, electricity, and food, emptied of most of its inhabitants who ended up parked in camps. Then came the methodical bombing and recapture of the city block by block. When soldiers occupied the hospital, The New York Times managed to justify this act on grounds that the hospital served as an enemy propaganda center by exaggerating the number of casualties. And by the way, just how many casualties were there? Nobody knows, there is no body count for Iraqis. When estimates are published, even by reputable scientific reviews, they are denounced as exaggerated. Finally, the inhabitants were allowed to return to their devastated city, by way of military checkpoints, and start to sift through the rubble, under the watchful eye of soldiers and biometric controls.
Jean Bricmont
One cannot fail to notice the inconsistency of those rejecting human rights: their rejection takes place in the public square created by human rights. It is difficult to reject human rights without using them.
Filip Spagnoli
Foulmouthed individuals seem to have their neuron systems replaced by colon structures, given that their terminology profusely consists of "sh*t and f*ck". ("Tolerance zero")
Erik Pevernagie
Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention; and what we term justice is truly nothing but this equilibrium transformed, as honey is nothing but a transformation of the sweetness found in the flower. Outside man there is no justice; within him injustice cannot be.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.
René Sterne
‎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
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
We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.
Luc Sante
The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.
Luc Sante
Unless we close our eyes we are always deceived.
Maurice Maeterlinck