Quotes by Belgian/Belgium authors (page 5)

"But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"We don't want protectionism at the heart of the European Union"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"Crises are challenges, not calamities"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language"

Paul de Man, Critic

"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements"

Paul de Man, Critic

"Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being"

Paul de Man, Critic

"Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament"

Paul de Man, Critic

"Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars"

Leo Baekeland, Inventor

"But if our hopes are betrayed, if we are forced to resist the invasion of our soil, and to defend our threatened homes, this duty, however hard it may be, will find us armed and resolved upon the greatest sacrifices"

King Albert II, Royalty

"The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West"

Henri Pirenne, Historian

"Where do you find the strength to brave a barrage of enemy fire and to bring your wounded friends to safety at great risk to your own life? Conviction"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign of life"

Stijn Streuvels, Writer

"After a sound drubbing followed by half a day's fasting, I felt more like laughing than like crying; and, in half a while, all was forgotten and my wickedness began afresh and worse than ever"

Stijn Streuvels, Writer

"The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means"

Paul de Man, Critic

"Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"Small bodies, about half a micron in diameter, and later referred to under the name of 'mitochondria' were detected under the light microscope as early as 1894"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"Once Ptolemy and Plato, yesterday Newton, today Einstein, and tomorrow new faiths, new beliefs, and new dimensions"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"It is the cells which create and maintain in us, during the span of our lives, our will to live and survive, to search and experiment, and to struggle"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"Then I was president of the Bakelite Corporation from 1910 to 1930"

Leo Baekeland, Inventor

"The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature"

Paul de Man, Critic

"In 1893 I founded a chemical company which I ran until 1899"

Leo Baekeland, Inventor

"One single vision fills all minds: that of our independence endangered. One single duty imposes itself upon our wills: the duty of stubborn resistance"

King Albert II, Royalty

"As far as I remember, even younger than eight, I have always been guided by reason. Not cold reason, but that which leads to the truth, to the real, and to sane Justice"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"Looking back 25 years later, what I may say is that the facts have been far better than the dreams. In the long course of cell life on this earth it remained, for our age for our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"For the resolving powers of our scientific instruments decide, at a given moment, of the size and the vision of our Universe, and of the image we then make of ourselves"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"In an action film you act in the action. If it's a dramatic film you act in the drama"

Jean Claude Van Damme, Actor

"What really helps a guy to become an action hero today is the directing of the movie. All those fast cuts"

Jean Claude Van Damme, Actor

"I've become 40, my audience is partly the same age"

Jean Claude Van Damme, Actor

"What is a movie star? It is an illusion. It was everything I ever wanted to be, but it became a kind of shell, non? It was what made me famous and got me women. But it wasn't real"

Jean Claude Van Damme, Actor

"One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication"

Georges Simenon, Writer

"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words"

Georges Simenon, Writer

"We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book"

Ernest Mandel, Author