Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 9

Emotional predictive profiling may help identify contingent fissures in the stature of endangered relationships. Still and all, it might be wise to let the genie out of problematic bottles in the first place, in advance of scouting the causes of surreptitious subliminal convulsions. ("Beware of the neighbor")
Erik Pevernagie
It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.
Esther Perel
When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.
May Sarton
One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
May Sarton
Look within yourself and ask yourself honestly what you want to be. Throw away the idea that school is the only way to get educated. Anything can educate you. Understand this and look through all the possibilities.
Jellis Vaes
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.
Georges Rodenbach
He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels
Henri Michaux
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
The secret does not lie in the perfection of your path, but in recognizing its imperfection.
Krist Pauwels
I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.
Georges Simenon
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
May Sarton
For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
May Sarton
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.
Paul Nougé
...I may seem like this flawless creature to you, someone with infinite wisdom and patience who always says the right thing, but, just like you—your parents—despite doing my best with what I have, I fail sometimes." A lone tear dangles from her eye. "And today is the fifth anniversary of my mother's death, so excuse me if I can't listen as attentively while you go on about how your parents screwed you up.
Harper Bliss
...If only Dad hadn't cheated. If only Mom had found a way to be happier. If only Nina hadn't run away. If only I could deal with it better. 'If' and 'only' are the two most useless words in the human vocabulary, Dr. Hakim had made a habit of saying. They should never be used together in a sentence, because they speak of something that's beyond your ability to change. A waste of energy.
Harper Bliss
As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave … overtook him with unwanted intensity.
Georges Rodenbach
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
I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom
May Sarton
There are women whose love only ends with death.
Georges Rodenbach
Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
May Sarton
Hope may inspire and inveigle us, but we cannot just live on hope. Certainly, love can be hope, but it is merely a contingency, since it might either mend our life or break our heart. ("Waiting for the smoke signals")
Erik Pevernagie
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
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
Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.
Esther Perel
For [erotically intelligent couples], love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered.
Esther Perel
La felicità non consiste nel mettersi al riparo dalla sofferenza, ma di integrarla al tessuto della nostra esistenza.
Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt
In the architecture of their life some may display Potemkin happiness in view of hiding the dark features of their fair weather relationship, preferring to set up a window dressing of fake satisfaction rather than being rejected as emotional outcasts. ("Absence of beauty was like hell")
Erik Pevernagie
When a soothing wind blows gently love through the thistledown of expectations, hope may inveigle the future for timeless care and tenderness to be anchored in a bay of good luck. ("Happiness blowing in the wind" )
Erik Pevernagie
Beauty is not a warrant for wellbeing and so does happiness not hinge on social success, but is only tangible via intricate, meandering discovery journeys in the mind. ("Absence of beauty was like hell")
Erik Pevernagie
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
Let us dare to dream and shoot for the moon. Even if we don’t fetch the moon, a million stars may fill us with wonder. ("Happiness blowing in the wind")
Erik Pevernagie
When love has left us in the lurch and nothing ever strikes a chord anymore, we may come to realize a vacuum of the lost vibrations of happiness and an absence of the ethereal and exalting feel of harmony that we only become aware of, after time passes by and everything has expired. (“Amour en friche”)
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
We need not be afraid of expecting the unexpected, but let us wheedle each instant we enjoy and endear each happy moment we encounter; let us watch each step we take and each move we make, ever since happiness is a loving and appealing fairy, but utterly frail and vulnerable. ("Happy days are back again")
Erik Pevernagie
Is happiness a sort of blissful state of mind or just a kind of surreal propensity? It may be hard to recognize its very nature, if we remain guilelessly confined in a state of woeful unawareness or in a no-man’s-land of emotions. In their dogged and obstinate quest for the zenith of happiness, many forget to take pleasure in the small things of everyday and, thus, become disgruntled and depressed instead, which leads them to a mire of gloom. ("C’est quand le bonheur “)
Erik Pevernagie
Before we can bring happiness to others, we first must be happy ourselves; nor will happiness abide within us unless we confer it on others. If there be a smile upon our lips, those around us will soon smile too; and our happiness will become the truer and deeper as we see that these others are happy. "It is not seemly that I, who, willingly, have brought sorrow to none, should permit myself to be sad," said Marcus Aurelius, in one of his noblest passages.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Some don’t want to be happy, inasmuch as they undergo happiness merely as languor and yawning. They are dissatisfied with a bland and vacuous state of glee and, instead, prefer to keep on running like raging bulls through the whims and quirks of life. In reality, their dissatisfaction is their contentment. ("Happiness blowing in the wind" )
Erik Pevernagie
The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.
May Sarton
Truly they who know still know nothing if the strength of love be not theirs; for the true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
He who knows himself is wise; yet have we no sooner acquired real consciousness of our being than we learn that true wisdom is a thing that lies far deeper than consciousness. The chief gain of increased consciousness is that it unveils an ever-loftier unconsciousness, on whose heights do the sources lie of the purest wisdom.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Wisdom is the lamp of love, and love is the oil of the lamp. Love, sinking deeper, grows wiser; and wisdom that springs up aloft comes ever the nearer to love. Love is the food of wisdom; wisdom the food of love; a circle of light within which those who love, clasp the hands of those who are wise.
Maurice Maeterlinck
He is wise who at last sees in suffering only the light that it sheds on his soul; and whose eyes never rest on the shadow it casts upon those who have sent it towards him. And wiser still is the man to whom sorrow and joy not only bring increase of consciousness, but also the knowledge that something exists superior to consciousness even. To have reached this point is to reach the summit of inward life, whence at last we look down on the flames whose light has helped our ascent.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
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
For what are in reality the things we call ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Virtue,’ ‘Heroism,’ ‘sublime hours,’ and ‘great moments of life,’ but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; …
Maurice Maeterlinck
Should we not invariably act in this life as though the God whom our heart desires with its highest desire were watching our every action?
Maurice Maeterlinck
Ieder beest bidt op zijn manier.
Tom Lanoye
Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.
Maurice Maeterlinck
For it is our most secret desire that governs and dominates all. If your eyes look for nothing but evil, you will always see evil triumphant; but if you have learned to let your glance rest on sincerity, simpleness, truth, you will ever discover, deep down in all things, the silent overpowering victory of that which you love.
Maurice Maeterlinck
A piece of art comes to life, when we can feel, it is breathing, when it talks to us and starts raising questions. It may dispel biased perceptions; make us recognize ignored fragments and remember forsaken episodes of our life story. Art may sometimes even be nasty and disturbing, if we don’t want to consent to its philosophy or concept, but it might, in the end, perhaps reconcile us with ourselves. ("When is Art?")
Erik Pevernagie
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well....
René Magritte
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Leef hard en goed en schoon en wild. Kijk goed, voel beter. Wees niet bang. Kies voor wat u blij maakt, wat het ook moge zijn. Durf proberen wat te lastig lijkt. Leg de lat hoog genoeg. Koester en laat u koesteren. Geef anderen wat ze verdienen, en uzelf minstens ook. Blijf hopen, willen, dromen, wensen.
Griet Op de Beeck
I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand. We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.
Hugo Claus
You're always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.
Diane Von Furstenberg
The most important relationship in your life is the relationship you have with yourself. Because no matter what happens, you will always be with yourself.
Diane Von Furstenberg
When a woman becomes her own best friend life is easier.
Diane Von Furstenberg