59 Quotes by Georges Rodenbach

The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.

All lovers desire solitude in order to possess each other more completely. They create for each other a new universe inhabited by the two of them alone. ("The Dead Town")

There are women whose love only ends with death.

Can there be anything more sad than a girl dying on the day of her first communion, in her new dress. A little bride of death...

Il y a donc des amours pareils à ces fruits de la Mer Morte qui ne vous laissent à la bouche qu'un goût de cendre impérissable.

He mostly preached in the evening, when the college church was already shrouded in shadow. And he chose subjects that filled the imagination with salutary fear—sin, Hell, death—painting pictures that were sometimes cajoling, more often harrowing, evoking the effects of the fire on the damned. The little group of pupils listened, apprehensive, sometimes terrified, a distraught flock whose black shepherd is gesticulating towards distant flames.

Now Borluut tried to work out how this had happened to him. Passion flows like a river and it is very difficult to go back to its source. It began imperceptibly.

Is not piety itself passion, but passion ennobled, sanctified? The whole of the Catholic liturgy, with its scenery and props, of which every one is an inspired invention, is enough to satisfy those suffering the obscure torments of a conflict between the ideal and sensuality.

Oh, the joy of the arrival of a child, which is both the one and the other, a mirror in which husband and wife, who love each other, can see each other in one single face.