Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 8

fear of change is like standing under a hot shower and knowing the moment you'll turn it off you'll be freezing cold
Erik Tanghe
Without a clear-cut vision and a proper reading of the roadmap we may not reach the buoyant shores of the horizon. If we only keep looking into the middle distance, we might easily walk straight into the wall. ("Change of Vision")
Erik Pevernagie
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
Many men remain spoiled boys that have never grown up. Women are prepared to raise them and take pain with patience, both as a condescendant contribution to supercilious compassion and as a proof of the eminence of their sense of worth. ("Prêt-à-penser" / "Ready-to-wear thinking")
Erik Pevernagie
Women emerging like aliens in a hesitant future, in a men’s world with impervious codes, may feel like dots in an uncharted territory. Discovering the crucial points, which don't line up with the unbearability of reality, may be a key to the right compass in life. ( "Terra incognita")
Erik Pevernagie
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?
May Sarton
Now is the time to become a myth.
Diane Von Furstenberg
Your scars are unique gems that contain opportunities for both personal growth and to help save the life of someone else. However, you can only realize these when you fully claim who you are. And to fully claim who you are also means recognizing, and taking ownership of the scars that come along with the rest of you.
Jellis Vaes
Although we cannot attain Jesus in his fullness unless at the same time we also take into account his unique relationship with God which has a special nature of its own, this does not of itself mean that Jesus' unique way of life is the only way to God. For even Jesus not only reveals God but also conceals him, since he appeared among us in non-godlike, creaturely humanity. As man he is a historical, contingent being who in no way can represent the full riches of God... unless one denies the reality of his real humanity (and that runs counter to the consensus of the church). So the gospel itself forbids us to speak of a Christian religious imperialism and exclusivism.
Edward Schillebeeckx
In the rough-and-tumble play of politics, dog-whistle messages are copiously dispatched over the heads of the grassroots people that cannot see the writing on the wall and have to remain in the cold, like dumb puppets on a string. ("What after bowling alone?" )
Erik Pevernagie
All concepts of politics, of whatever kind, are about conflict──how to contain it, or abolish it.
Ralph Miliband
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
I still wonder how policy officials... can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enough, I think, to turn any reasonable man into a prisoner of his own conscience for the rest of his life.
Paul Rusesabagina
Instead of breaking or cherry-picking the rules, many just follow the inner rules, which have been instilled during their lifetime and have subtly permeated their thinking. They value rules, as it offers the ravishment of a securing, ceremonial rhythm in life and it prevents them from breaking free from their cocoon, all the more because freedom can be so scaring and exhausting. ("When forgetting the rules of the game" )
Erik Pevernagie
Dwelling among shipwrecked dreams and losing oneself in wishful thinking cannot be a solution to tribulations. Identifying cracks and apprehending the defaults in one's life is essential to find a way to get out of a ghetto and to start a search for a new haven. ("The world was somewhere else" )
Erik Pevernagie
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
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
What remains to us here, behind the Yser, is not much more than a strip of land almost impossible to defend; a few rain-soaked trenches around razed villages; roads blown to smithereens, unusable by any vehicle; a creaky old horse cart we haul around ourselves, loaded with crates of damp ammunition that are constantly on the verge of sliding into a canal, forcing us to slog like madmen for every ten yards of progress as we stifle our warning cries; the snarling officers in the larger dug-outs, walled off with boards, where the privates have to bail water every day and brush the perpetual muck off their superiors’ boots; the endless crouching as we walk the trenches, grimy and smelly; our louse-ridden uniforms; our arseholes burning with irritation because we have no clean water for washing them after our regular attacks of diarrhoea; our stomach cramps as we crawl over heavy clods of earth like trolls in some gruesome fairy tale; the evening sun slanting down over the barren expanse; infected fingers torn by barbed wire; the startling memory of another, improbable life, when a thrush bursts into song in a mulberry bush or a spring breeze carries the smell of grassy fields from far behind the front line, and we throw ourselves flat on our bellies again as howitzers open fire out of nowhere, the crusts of bread in our hands falling into the sludge at the boot-mashed bottom of the stinking trench.
Stefan Hertmans
Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. ("Fish for silence.")
Erik Pevernagie
The grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. Many politicians promise green, green grass by blending niceties with delusion and by using alluring confidence tricks. They voice attractive tales and tell things, people like to hear. But the post-factual grassland often appears to be parched and barren. ("The grass was greener over there")
Erik Pevernagie
If bees die, people will die. Only ignorance never dies! ("Why step out of nature ?")
Erik Pevernagie
Relatedness is vital in a time when so many people suffer from social deafness. Emotional insensitivity being caused by a redoubtable “tin ear” makes it impossible to hear any signs of empathy or capture the vibrant qualities of ‘sharing’. ("Only needed a light ")
Erik Pevernagie
Rumours should be juicy and gossips must be mouth-watering, since they have to uplift and make people feel better. Tittle-tattle can have a swift ripple effect and when the ball is rolling very fast, it kick-starts a flood of moral destruction. “Schadenfreude” can, then, be fully enjoyed. (“Juicy rumours”)
Erik Pevernagie
A thousand times, people may have touched each other, but never ever sensed a single vein of oneness or complicity in the wilderness of their inner world, since obdurate mental impediments have been barricading the road to understanding and propinquity. (“A thousand times”)
Erik Pevernagie
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
What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ("Give me more images")
Erik Pevernagie
If the whole world is in a rush and people are out of step with themselves, they fail to catch that quirky aura and that special quality of life that feeds our soul-searching frame of mind and that builds a coveted haven, giving recognition and self-reliance. ("The unbearable heaviness of being”)
Erik Pevernagie
People who don’t construe their life and don’t frame their own tale, stay on the sidelines, remain only an act without a story and turn into an "empty box". Out-of-the-box thinking and inventiveness remains then merely wishfull thinking. ( "Everybody his story" )
Erik Pevernagie
When people’s parallel truth collides with their real truth, they may have a hard time in subduing all the fanciful items and characters of their invented world. (“The day the mirror was talking back”)
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
… it is that such of us as have loved deeply have learnt many secrets that are unknown to others; for thousands and thousands of things quiver in silence on the lips of true friendship and love, that are not to be found in the silence of other lips, to which friendship and love are unknown. …
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
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
Woe betides anyone getting in the way of people that keep on muddying the waters, throwing up smoke screens and clouding issues, so as to conceal their dubious motivations. ("Could the milkman be the devil?")
Erik Pevernagie
There is not one single thing you cannot do if you are able to see fear for what it truly is. Life is full of choices, and one of those choices involves fear. You can either let it control you, or you can learn to control it.
Jellis Vaes
Don't confuse love with the fear of being lonely...
Erik Tanghe
The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. (“Into a new life”)
Erik Pevernagie
When you live.. You can die.. Accept it... ..and become fearless
Erik Tanghe
How much your life sucks, or how awesome your life is, is really all determined by how much fear controls your life.
Jellis Vaes
Fear has always been a very important whistleblower. Our emotion and our history can provoke fear that may arrest us at any time or at any place. Above and beyond, fear might be contagious and its scent, sometimes sensual, sometimes mystical or animal, can exude the musty and arcane smell of destiny. ("One could still feel the smell of fear" )
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
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
Maurice Maeterlinck
It may be prodigious, but it's all Greek to me!
Hergé
Hooray! Hooray! The end of the world has been postponed!
Hergé
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
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
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
Maurice Maeterlinck
It may be prodigious, but it's all Greek to me!
Hergé
Hooray! Hooray! The end of the world has been postponed!
Hergé
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
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
There is good to be found within anything bad. Even within the death of your own father.
Jellis Vaes
We are constantly taught in both in what we read, and what we see on the TV be it consciously and subconsciously, that being unhappy is not normal. Every time we read or hear about how we should be feeling happy, and how we need to go about it, and for whatever reason we aren’t at that moment in time, well, you feel that’s something must be wrong with you. “What’s wrong with me, I should be feeling happy in my life, but I’m not. Every article I have read says all those steps on how to be happy, but they don’t seem to work for me, I am still unhappy.”You come to see unhappiness as some kind of problem with you, with your personality. Something not normal at all. But it is. It is very normal. It is part of every human being, it is a part of you, it is part of who you are. You’ve got to first of all understand and acknowledge that feeling unhappy is nothing but normal and it isn’t something you should be afraid of. It only means that your emotions are functioning well and are taking care of you by keeping you up to date with the truth.
Jellis Vaes
You either live to become an anchor of inspiration for those around you, or you live to become an anchor for a lesson for them. Whatever you become, it is entirely up to you to decide.
Jellis Vaes
Look, you can say that life is meaningless, because in the end we are all no more than dust in the wind and all that we do will ultimately be forgotten in hundreds or thousands of years’ time. But do you really want to live with that belief? Give yourself a higher meaning, give yourself a purpose why you were given this life. I am not a religious person but I do believe that we are all given this life for a reason, and that death is only the beginning of something bigger. Call me crazy, I don’t care. It gives me sense and an urgency to make this life count because I know it matters. You feel that way because you do not have that. Give this life a meaning and all that you do and will come to do will become meaningful instead of meaningless
Jellis Vaes
It’s true that no one ever said life would be easy, but it is also true that no one ever said you had to go through it alone.
Jellis Vaes
But something happened when I got out into the world, something that changed me. It was the reconnection of being at one with yourself and with this world.
Jellis Vaes
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
Relationships may become wrecked by a quirky syndrome: the “Ain't broke, don't fix”-syndrome. When there is no interaction in the neural network and no breakthrough into the mind but only a shallow skin experience, living together might be very torturous. If a heartfelt bond has not been molded, nothing can be broken and thus nothing needs to be fixed. (“I wonder what went wrong.”)
Erik Pevernagie
When relationships lose their pitch through lack of interest and become stale or unbearable through enduring stealthy backbiting, the emotional house of cards is under attack. A painstaking reshuffle, however, may brand a new choice of life and create energy for positive thinking, whereas remaining bogged down in dispiriting situations and staying clogged up with immaterial hassle may only spawn forlorn deadlocks.. ("Mes cliques et mes claques")
Erik Pevernagie