238 Quotes by Belgian authors

Belgian voices speak with a soft, wry light: multilingual, gently surreal, and attentive to streets wet with rain. Their lines juggle compromise and stubbornness, memory and appetite, faith and skepticism. Between the North Sea wind and the clink of café glasses, irony often shelters tenderness. Wordplay slips between French and Dutch; understatement does the heavy lifting. The small scale invites a wide gaze, port, village, palace corridor, where longing meets practical wit, and a stoic smile can turn suddenly into song.

See the complete list of authors from Belgium

"The more you'll dress up the more fun you'll have"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but clones kind of get it wrong because we are promoting individuality and being proud of being yourself"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"I refuse to be held responsible for bringing back a wave of pasty-faced people into the world"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"I love being a freak. It's great!"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"I'm tired of being around men all the time. I'm going to start a band called Skirt with three girls and I'll play the guitar and sing backing vocals in drag. I went window shopping when I was in New York, saw a lot of amazing dresses"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"I feel very comfortable with the way I look, and I feel very comfortable with the kind of confusion that it creates in people's minds"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"There's a hell of a lot of freedom in this rock and roll circus... it's where all the freaks go - it's the environment for me"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"My mouth has a tendency to get me into trouble, but because I'm so small and I take on people who are lager than me. If someone punched me, I'd get my drummer beat them up"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"I'd be interested in finding out if there is a light you walk into, and if you do meet people from your life and walk hand in hand with Jesus. I would hate for my death to be tragic: I'd like to be old when it happens. But hopefully a young death is unlikely"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"Dresses, I find, are impractical in social situations, but I enjoy wearing them a great deal on stage"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"I guess the line between being paranoid and being a rock star is smaller than one would expect"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"We live in a strange bubble"

Brian Molko, Musician

Small: Brian Molko

"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

"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

"Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament"

Paul de Man, Critic

"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

"To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

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

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"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

"Let us face it: in the world today, money and economic strength remain more powerful arguments than the number of people you represent"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

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

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"Crises are challenges, not calamities"

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

"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

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

Guy Verhofstadt, Statesman

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