Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 4

The pale water which goes away along paths of silence.
Georges Rodenbach
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")
Erik Pevernagie
However imperfect our conception of virtue, still let us cling to it; for a moment’s forgetfulness exposes us to all the malignant forces from without. The simplest lie to myself, buried though it may be in the silence of my soul, may yet be as dangerous to my inner liberty as an act of treachery on the marketplace. Widfom and Destiny
Maurice Maeterlinck
Some may remain imprisoned in a gridlock of lies or keep on blurring the lines between facts and fables, expecting us to buy the debilitating and fake narrative of their life, until they eventually end up on the chopping block of the inexorable truth. Be that as it may, one can “fool people some of the time, but not all of the time”. (“Bribe payers' index »)
Erik Pevernagie
In the land of the ostriches, the blind are king. When politicians bury their head in the sand, ignorance rules the country. ( "High noon." )
Erik Pevernagie
A thought that is almost beautiful – a thought that you speak not, but that you cherish within you at this moment, will irradiate you as though you were a transparent vase.
Maurice Maeterlinck
If we misread the blueprint of our life, we need not be ashamed of backtracking on our chosen options. Admitting to mistakes may make us human and maybe great again. ("Sisyphus' hardship on the hill")
Erik Pevernagie
If the vibrant and frolicking merry-go-round of our daily living has been ousted by an eerie void of an intractable vacuum, only inspiriting memories may shore up our inner world. ("Only silence remained ")
Erik Pevernagie
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
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
Better thinking out loud than suffocating from frustration. ("The upper lip must never tremble" )
Erik Pevernagie
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")
Erik Pevernagie
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”)
Erik Pevernagie
Some men can be good ' horse whisperers ' and many dogs can be wonderful ' man whisperers '.
Erik Pevernagie
Man may feel like a feeble and powerless pawn, at some moment in his life. This apprehension can come out of the blue, in the middle of the day, at the center of a public place, like a cerebral attack. Check mated by 'daily routine', he may feel trapped in a smothering set of circumstances and only a deconstruction of all impeding barriers can bring about a vital mental deliverance. ( "Check and mate" )
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
Music has touched me deeply, sometimes to tears. But at the same time it's been life-affirming, because I've been grateful for the fact that I'm alive and human and capable of being so moved.
Brian Molko
I’m in love with you,” I whispered, searching her eyes. i looked very pale and very scared, and a little…hopeful.
Dries Wils
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
You can not go back. That's why it's hard to choose. You have to make the right choice. As long, as you don't choose, everything remains possible.
Jaco Van Dormael
Don't be sad because I'm dying, be happy because very second another great human being is born, another person that ill have chances to do greater things than me.
Emma Claeys
It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?" - "When Our Lips Speak Together
Luce Irigaray
Life gives us a flair of awareness in the breeze of our daily journey and offers a free reign to explore what we are, to experience what we are not and to find out what we may become: a free ride until everything melts down into the indistinct and indefinite, while walking up to the ultimate gate of non-existence. ("Living on probation")
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
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
...when the petals fallSay it is beautiful and good, say it is well
May Sarton
It is time I came back to my real lifeAfter this voyage to an island with no name,Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.
May Sarton
I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sarton
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" )
Erik Pevernagie
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
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
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")
Maurice Maeterlinck
A bolt that raised her heart to blazing heightAnd made the vertical the very thrust of hope,And found its path at last(Slow work of Grace).
May Sarton
...The means of choice:She might choose to ascendThe falling dream,By some angelic power without a nameReverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,Know height without an end,Density melt to air, silence yield a voice--Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace.
May Sarton
Should happiness and success be hidden, in view of the misery and poverty around. Would it be a sign of selfishness and un-intellectual behavior, if we admit to a pursuit of happiness? Could it, on the contrary, not work out as a motivation and an incentive? When giving voice to our happiness, could it not be perceived as a positive challenge? Could happiness not be contagious and become a salutary infectious syndrome? A beneficial infection. ( "Happy days are back again" )
Erik Pevernagie
White stars don't mix with the dark blackness of the universe. If they did... everything would be grey
Erik Tanghe
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
A lot of the names in Talon reference other people or events. For example Amelia, the giant Eagle, was a “tip of my hat” to the extraordinary aviator Amelia Earhart. Both love(d) to fly!
Christopher Gérard
After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige.
Franz Cumont
What does myself now say to me?"Open the door of Mystery.
May Sarton
Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes.
Georges Simenon
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")
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
Let us not still our anger against indifference and inattention and let us not glitziness, superciliousness and mumbo jumbo slither into our thinking and our actions, if we don’t want our conscience to be backfired on. (“Twilight of desire”)
Erik Pevernagie
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")
Erik Pevernagie
Life ... is a burden. The day about to begin is an oppressive weight.... The erect penis is heavy, even heavier the hanging one. Even the most tender breast has to be dragged along.
Jean Améry
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
When people become prisoners of daily habits and happen to be hostages of choices, which they made in the past, but which they finally do not actually want, they experience the need to abandon their corporeal prison at a certain time in life. ( "Corporeal prison" )
Erik Pevernagie
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")
Erik Pevernagie
Once we get to know where and why the skeletons of the past are buried, we can start wading across our muddled memories into the open plains of a new horizon. ("Going back to yesterday")
Erik Pevernagie
The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being.
Luce Irigaray
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
Shrink wrapped ideas and prefabricated thoughts are a result of sloth and laziness. ("Prêt-à-penser")
Erik Pevernagie
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
When our thoughts are unsettled and our inner world is in a muddle, we may sharpen our wits and try to recognize the invisible edges of our fractured stance. If we seek to figure out, what our life story is all about, we may be able to put the missing pieces in place and identify what is driving us, what we are actually up to and why we are running like mad dogs, sometimes. (“On a doggy day”)
Erik Pevernagie
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
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
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" )
Erik Pevernagie