Flemish Quotes & Sayings

Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves? — Henry James

[reading a work in translation] is like viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the color of voices, the rhythm of footsteps. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I feel more European than Belgian. However I do think that my Flemish roots have an impact on my character and culture. — Ann Demeulemeester

Enthusiasm is caught, not taught. — Mark Twain

My parents, of Belgian-German extraction, were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in England during the war. They returned to Belgium in 1920, and I grew up in the cosmopolitan harbour city of Antwerp, at a time when education in the Flemish part of the country was still half French and half Flemish. — Christian De Duve

Although I am a young leader, I actually came to it strangely quite late. I have a different perspective, partly because of my family, partly because of what I did for ten years: negotiating trade deals, working out in Central Asia doing assistance projects. — Nick Clegg

The Word in your head is the Word that you know, but the Word in your heart is the Word you live by. — Sunday Adelaja

We often reward mediocrity because it is comforting. If they can do it, anyone can do it. — Jessica Zafra

The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland must have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn't a trace of topsoil; only sand and clay. The Belgians call them 'clyttes', these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become. In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rains (which is almost constantly from early September through to March, except when it snows) the water rises at you out of the ground. It rises from your footprints-and an army marching over a field can cause a flood. In 1916, it was said that you 'waded to the front'. Men and horses sank from sight. They drowned in mud. Their graves, it seemed, just dug themselves and pulled them down. — Timothy Findley

The proximate causes of the Flemish "peasant" revolt were local and immediate; its roots, the reason it could occur in the first place, were four centuries in creation. As Europe's population increased threefold between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Continent's demographic pyramid changed its shape. The base grew larger relative to its peak, and more distant: the gap between nobility and peasantry got bigger and bigger. Families that were noble by birth became more and more "noble" in behavior: dressing more opulently, entertaining more lavishly, and housing themselves more extravagantly, while the rural peasantry lived more or less the same as their many times great-grandparents. — William Rosen

There wasn't any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous ... fatal, in the end. — Robert A. Heinlein

Nice to be here? At my age it's nice to be anywhere. — George Burns

What are you called?" "Georgette. How are you called?" "Jacob." "That's a Flemish name." "American too." "You're not Flamand?" "No, American." "Good, I detest Flamands. — Ernest Hemingway,

My dream is to own a Hockney - I'm a Yorkshireman, and his vibrant colours are a good example of how the north-country people are vibrant and colourful. — Brian Blessed

One of the secrets to life is saying yes to change and allowing things to transition, but I also think you have to mark the time and give thanks for all that it gave you. — Josh Radnor

The Academy of the Sword (1630) by the Flemish master Gerard Thibault d — Cary Elwes

measured his own length in the Flemish mud and skidded forward, all elbows and knees; then he jerked erect again, breathless, desperate and angered, at the heart of a sudden — Peter Tonkin

I am proposing to you as a rallying emblem the letter V, because V is the first letter of the words 'Victoire' in French, and 'Vrijheid' in Flemish ... the Victory which will give us back our freedom, the Victory of our good friends the English. Their word for Victory also begins with V. As you see, things fit all round. — Victor De Laveleye

Heartbreak is its own form of amnesia. — Lauren Kate

In Flemish bond, headers alternate with stretchers from brick to brick. Flemish bond is much more popular than English, not because it is stronger, but because it is more economical since every facade has more long faces than short ones, and thus requires fewer bricks. But there were many other patterns - Chinese bond, Dearne's bond, English garden-wall bond, cross bond, rat-trap bond, monk bond, flying bond, and so on - each signifying a different configuration of headers and stretchers. — Bill Bryson

I am just a Flemish girl with her feet on the ground. — Ann Demeulemeester

However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors. — Honore De Balzac

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest - dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare, - the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens, - young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the "dear body" and "dear heart." II — Arthur Rimbaud