Erik Pevernagie Quotes

Life gives us a flair of awareness in the breeze of our daily journey and offers a free reign to explore what we are, to experience what we are not and to find out what we may become: a free ride until everything melts down into the indistinct and indefinite, while walking up to the ultimate gate of non-existence. ("Living on probation")

For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ("Another empty room")

The day we decide to drop the flimsy makeshift scenarios in our cluttered mind and eschew the ‘alleluias’ of self-importance, life can become genuine, lucid and graceful, like a flow of wellness in the glow of a new morning. ("Words flew away like birds")

Only if we transvalue the plain-vanilla standards of our life, we may bring back things to light and sense the lies behind perceptions. ("Behind the frosted glass")

Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)

Some may remain imprisoned in a gridlock of lies or keep on blurring the lines between facts and fables, expecting us to buy the debilitating and fake narrative of their life, until they eventually end up on the chopping block of the inexorable truth. Be that as it may, one can “fool people some of the time, but not all of the time”. (“Bribe payers' index »)

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”)

Comes the tipping point in life, when we decide to a ‘stop and search’ and our emotional police bring us to a standstill. This allows us to scan all the little details in the spectrum of our being; scour all fuzzy or cryptic elements that are floating around in our mind and restore the fault lines in the cluttered tale of our life. ("The world was somewhere else")

When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. (“Is that all there is?”)

If the vibrant and frolicking merry-go-round of our daily living has been ousted by an eerie void of an intractable vacuum, only inspiriting memories may shore up our inner world. ("Only silence remained ")

In a world spoiled by the obituary of attention and the dormancy of empathy, people are coming up short of authentic emotion. (“The upper lip must never tremble”)

Pigs should not make friends with butchers. One must choose one's friends wisely.

Should happiness and success be hidden, in view of the misery and poverty around. Would it be a sign of selfishness and un-intellectual behavior, if we admit to a pursuit of happiness? Could it, on the contrary, not work out as a motivation and an incentive? When giving voice to our happiness, could it not be perceived as a positive challenge? Could happiness not be contagious and become a salutary infectious syndrome? A beneficial infection. ( "Happy days are back again" )

When shrouded meanings and grim intentions are nicely polished up and pokerfaced personae are generously palming off their fantasy constructs, caution is the watchword, since rimpling water on the well of truth swiftly obscures our vision and perception. ("Trompe le pied.")

Happiness is good management of expectations and good management means making order and assembling the contingent elements of the "do's'" and the "don'ts", the "maybe yes'" and the "maybe not's". When we really want to live in agreement with ourselves and find peace with the surrounding world, good management is liberating. ( " Expectations " )

When grief impounds our thinking and eats our brains, it seeps through all the cracks of our daily living. Only the soothing wind of comforting words may counter the withering twilight and the frostiness of darkness. ("All the words he always wanted to tell her.")

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" )

Some people look as if they have lost their eagerness and passion. Their aspiration seems to be exhausted and fresh inspiration has abandoned their weary mind. Life has boundlessly given them material welfare, which has fully spoiled them in the end. No energy for longing has been left, as they have reached a twilight zone. The twilight of desire. ( "Twilight of desire" )

People are seen through the stained glass window of our imagination. ( "The hidden sides of his character" )

When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )

Better thinking out loud than suffocating from frustration. ("The upper lip must never tremble" )

Let us not still our anger against indifference and inattention and let us not glitziness, superciliousness and mumbo jumbo slither into our thinking and our actions, if we don’t want our conscience to be backfired on. (“Twilight of desire”)

We can give happiness a chance: happiness is learnable. Life is a choice and happiness is a question of focusing, hearing and seeing the right things behind the appearances. It is a matter of finding out, differencing worthiness and irrelevance, connectedness and distantness, warmth and aloofness, brightness and dimness. Happiness is the lucky potential to steer friskily along the cliffs of the unknown avoiding the obstacles of narcissism and conceit. ( " Happiness blowing in the wind. " )

All incidents which we experience are warily interpreted and translated in the dark chamber of our mind. They inspire us how to behave, how to think, how to act and prompt our predilections and our way of visualizing the world. The mind opens itself then to welcome the enchantments of life or to tear up destructive thinking patterns. The brain becomes truly a precious resilient partner. ( "Camera obscura of the mind" )

Love is blind. Love of money is blind. Greed and money make people forfeit the quiddity of life, banish them from what is essential and alienate them from themselves. They lose their identity and become drifting exiles. ( "Money rocking and rolling" )

Let’s not wait until the light fades into irreparable loss, but let’s stay in the loop and pursue the momentous flow of daily little wonders, since life kindly tenders us gorgeous bouquets of sparkling colors, telling signs and rousing episodes. (“Côté cour…Côté jardin”)

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")

When love becomes a play of squirming mindgames or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset. ("Another empty room")

Let us doom and gloom not creep into our day and lust for life not wither away. With the future as brother-in-arms, steps in the unknown should not frighten. ("Steps in the unknown" )

Art can blow us out of our pigeon hole. In deafness it may shout or scream, in blindness it may arrest our attention, in numbness it may shake up our mind. If we don’t sense anything at all and take everything for granted, art can kick us in the ass, give a conscience and make us aware. ("When is Art?")

Foulmouthed individuals seem to have their neuron systems replaced by colon structures, given that their terminology profusely consists of "sh*t and f*ck". ("Tolerance zero")

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 “)

Everybody wants what feels good; and if we wish a symphony of attention from a bunch of caring people and a harmony of happy sounds during our lifetime, we must not act like dark horses, saving up our emotions, but be bountiful to all significant others. ( “Axelle Red “)

Through dreams and ideas we are seduced to go back to particular places and instances of our past. In the course of the years, these singular moments and spaces of our history very often receive then another color and dimension. Our mind tries however to tame and keep in control the phantoms of times past. If not so, our memory can be subject to an irreversible mutilation. ( "The mutilated memory" )

One day it may feel as if energy and enthusiasm are quenched, feelings dried up and emotions scorched, love and affection tangled in a harsh and uninviting setting. Nothing seems to grow anymore. No seed. No flowers. No foreseeable hope. No conceivable prospects. Any blossom of expectation seems to have become an illusion and life appears to have come to a standstill. If no seed of loving care is sown in the untilled, abandoned land, no bud can come into flower. Singer Amy Winehouse felt like lying fallow in the ground of a wasteland "with tears dry, dying a hundred times, going back to black" and leaving eventually for a place of ultimate sorrow and heartbreak, for a point of no return. ( “Amour en friche” )

When we fail to reflect on the undercurrents of the circumstances of our life, we may have permanent misgivings about the quality of our interpretations. A lucid reading of our acts and our desires helps us to avoid tumbling into a frustrating gap between what we expect and what others expect. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)

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”)

Love is illiterate. Whether we write it big or small, we cannot read it. We might only guess. ( "I seek you" )

What a wonderful world it could be, when spiritual factions would choose to read sacred writings as colorful metaphors and not as bloody declarations of war. (“Is heaven a place in the sky?”)

Things as they appear every day and as they are engraved in our memory, facts and occurrences as they are perceived by senses, create an intricate labyrinth in the mind. The way how things are experienced in our environment and how they react in the arsenal of our imagination, creates a torrent of inspiring ideas that flood the speedy highways of our brains. ( " Labyrinth of the mind " )

Life can be generous, but leaves us with a trilemma: How can we reconcile three diverse features: ‘I’, 'me' and the 'others'. Since the “I” entails what I want; the “me” what others expect of me and the “others” what others themselves want. The bridges between "individuality", “surroundings” and "otherness" can be abysmal and very often waiting to be restored. (“I am on my own side, but I can listen “ )

When we allow ourselves to show some patience and take time to listen to the others, we may learn a lot about ourselves. Patience does not endure instant gratification, though, and self-knowledge may take a lifetime. (“I am on my own side, but I can listen “ )

If we really want to know, who we are and recognize our identity, we have to find out the identity of the others. By making friends with the others, we are able to make friends with ourselves. At that moment, we can sense how everything falls into place. ( “ Steps in the unknown" )

As light splinters into darkness, new thoughts may take over in the mind and allow upbeat views to gain power. Thus and so, thoughtfulness readily opens a blistering sky in the faltering shadow of unawareness. ("Absence of Desire")

Many politicians are tantalizing storytellers, as they mix facts with fiction, grab our emotion and tell things, they want us to believe. Their factoids are unremittingly reiterated, take a life on their own and in the end become the very truth… until the bubble bursts.("What after bowling alone?" )

We want life to make sense. If we don’t find meaning and orientation, we are bound to fabulate a living and invent an inspiring life story. When we write out a chosen script, we’ll have to make time to hunker down into attuning it to the hitches of the road map, time and again, with fractious patience. ( "Everybody his story" )

Some feel lucky, if they haven't got to be happy, as they don’t like their frame of mind to be unravelled and prefer to be left well enough alone. ( "C’est quand le bonheur ?" )

Understanding” may become “misunderstanding”, if no commitment or no responsibilities are assumed, no specific objectives set, no definite expectations met and common values and interests no longer shared. Mutual understanding may then, against all odds, end up in heartache, confusion and bewilderment. ("Mutual understanding" )