Quotes by Belgian/Belgium authors (page 3)

"Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence"

"A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods"

"It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom"

"Belgium thinks that however great the peril which a country might have to undergo under the system which we seek to establish here, that country ought to do its duty"

Henri La Fontaine, Lawyer

"There is no miracle cure for the many problems of the world"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"He went, ever on the move, with the slow, shuffling step of wandering beggars who are nowhere at home"

Stijn Streuvels, Writer

"Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts"

Paul de Man, Critic

"Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place"

Paul de Man, Critic

"I also served on many government committees"

Leo Baekeland, Inventor

"The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity"

Henri Pirenne, Historian

"Man has now become an adjunct to perfect and carry forward these conquests"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"In this kind of situation, we tend to cling to his convictions, we believe that, by magic, we are going to recover. Then we agree to drive less good cars and we are fatally more exposed. It is what finally happened to me with Ensign"

Jacky Ickx, Celebrity

"In the past, two colleagues died each season. It was generally accepted this could happen"

Jacky Ickx, Celebrity

"In the end I didn't get a top car any more. I had no toughness left. That was the reality"

Jacky Ickx, Celebrity

"Brothers in suffering, brothers in resistance, brothers in ideals and conviction. It is now our duty to further strengthen this bond in order to secure this hard-won freedom for future generations"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure"

Paul de Man, Critic

"The Germanic invasions in the West could not and did not in any way alter this state of affairs"

Henri Pirenne, Historian

"When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"The existence is a tremendous curiosity, with in the course of the years, the discovery of yourself in your inmost evolutions. With the age you feel better than you are, what you represent. Which means a little at the planet's scale"

Jacky Ickx, Celebrity

"But due to the present regulations the other drivers have better chances again. This brings back the tension"

Jacky Ickx, Celebrity

"The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world"

Georges Simenon, Writer

"Of course, I also gave him the ineffable pleasures of pipe smoking. And no children, because when this character was created I did not yet have the four children I later had. I must add I also gave him a certain taste for food"

Georges Simenon, Writer

"I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men"

Georges Simenon, Writer

"You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"Furthermore, there is absolutely no contradiction between the separate organizations of revolutionary vanguard militants and their participation in the mass organizations of the working class"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness"

Georges Simenon, Writer

"It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened"

Georges Simenon, Writer

"You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"There are no conditions in which we subordinate the interests of the class as a whole to the interests of any sect, any chapel, any separate organization"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class"

Ernest Mandel, Author

"The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class"

Ernest Mandel, Author