Top 35 Georges Rodenbach Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “She sinks. She sinks in holy sadness. Like an Ophelia in tears she sinks.”

— Georges Rodenbach

2. “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...”

— Georges Rodenbach

3. “The beauty of sorrow is superior to the beauty of life.”

— Georges Rodenbach

4. “Opposite is the old bell-tower of a church, all the more moving for being unfinished. What beauty there is in interrupted towers, which continue in dream and which we all complete within ourselves!”

— Georges Rodenbach

5. “The windows let in a perfect light, a vibrant light such as you get in the north, where a kind of grey gauze turns the sun to silver. And such solitude, such quiet.”

— Georges Rodenbach

6. “The essence of art that is at all noble is the DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.”

— Georges Rodenbach

7. “There are women whose love only ends with death.”

— Georges Rodenbach

8. “Is this not the collector’s exquisite pleasure, that his desire should know no bounds, should reach out into the infinite, should never know full possession which disappoints by its very completeness. O what joy to be able to postpone the fulfillment of desire to infinity!”

— Georges Rodenbach

9. “The carillon is, after all, the music of the people. Elsewhere, in the glittering capitals, public festivals are celebrated with fireworks, that magical offering that can thrill the very soul. Here, in the meditative land of Flanders, among the damp mists so antagonistic to the brilliance of fire, the carillon takes their place. It is a display of fireworks that one hears: flares, rockets, showers, a thousand sparks of sound which colour the air for visionary eyes alerted by hearing.”

— Georges Rodenbach

10. “The act of writing itself is like an act of love. There is contact. There is exchange too. We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them colour.”

— Georges Rodenbach

11. “The widower reviewed his past in a sunless light which was intensified by the greyness of the November twilight, whilst the bells subtly impregnated the surrounding atmosphere with the melody of sounds that faded like the ashes of dead years.”

— Georges Rodenbach

12. “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.”

— Georges Rodenbach

13. “Dissonance is as fatal in ailments of the mind as it is in those of the body.”

— Georges Rodenbach

14. “Oh, the vanity of plans! Our lives proceed regardless. All the things we work out in such minute detail slip away from us at the last moment, or change.”

— Georges Rodenbach

15. “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.”

— Georges Rodenbach

16. “Thus the tower was both disease and cure. It rendered him unfit for the world and it remedied the hurts inflicted by the world.”

— Georges Rodenbach

17. “The pale water which goes away along paths of silence.”

— Georges Rodenbach

18. “He felt alone, prey to the tedium, to the dreariness of time, especially at the approach of twilight which, during those late-autumn days, came in through the windows, settling on the furniture with a leaden pallor, sending the mirrors into mourning at light’s farewell...”

— Georges Rodenbach

19. “It is distance that creates nostalgia.”

— Georges Rodenbach

20. “Bruges had the air of a ghost town. The high towers, the trees along the canals withdrew, absorbed by the same muslin: impenetrable fog with not a single rift. Even the carillon seemed to have to escape, to force its way out of a prison yard filled with cotton wool to be free in the air, to reach the gables over which, every quarter of an hour, the bells poured, like falling leaves, a melancholy autumn of music.”

— Georges Rodenbach

21. “Ornamentation, festoons, carvings, cartouches, bas-reliefs, countless surprises among the sculptures – and the tones of the facades weathered by time and rain, the pinks of fading twilight, smoky blues, misty greys, a richness of mildew, brickwork ripened by the years, the hues of a ruddy or anaemic complexion.”

— Georges Rodenbach

22. “Woman is the window through which we see the world.”

— Georges Rodenbach

23. “He felt more cheerful, revived by the journey, released from himself and his poor life, uplifted by thoughts of the infinite.”

— Georges Rodenbach

24. “That is the way it is, we always fall in love because of a detail, a nuance. It is a marker we set up for ourselves in the midst of the confusion, in the infinite space of love. The greatest passions come from such little causes.”

— Georges Rodenbach

25. “They sensed that nothing needed to be said. In silence, minds understand each other.”

— Georges Rodenbach

26. “Is it not strange how quickly one can become detached from everything? How empty life appears when one is close to death!”

— Georges Rodenbach

27. “Every town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air.”

— Georges Rodenbach

28. “Now Borluut was seeing it from close to. And to its very end, it seemed, from the way the line of the horizon merged into the infinite. It was bare. Not one ship. It ground out a dirge, in a glaucous tone, opaque, uniform. One sensed that all the colours were below, but faded. At the edge, the waves spilling onto the shore made a sound of washerwomen beating sheets of white linen, a whole supply of shrouds for future storms.”

— Georges Rodenbach

29. “Bartholomeus went on, ‘I wanted to show that these objects are sensitive, suffer at the coming of night, faint at the departure of the last rays, which, by the way, also live in this room; they suffer as much, they fight against the darkness. There you have it. It’s the life of things, if you like. The French would call it a nature morte, a picture of inanimate objects. That is not what I’m trying to show. Flemish puts it better: a still life.”

— Georges Rodenbach

30. “Gripped by a feverish urge to climb, he felt like running up the stone stairs. People often talk of the attraction of the abyss. There is also the abyss above. Borluut was still going up; he would have liked to keep on going up for ever, melancholy at the thought that the stairway was doubtless going to stop and that at the end, on the edge of the air, he would still yearn to continue, go farther, higher.”

— Georges Rodenbach

31. “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.”

— Georges Rodenbach

32. “Does it not sometimes happen in life that our actions are solely for an enemy, so as to stand up to him, to confound him, to humiliate him by a finer effort or a more difficult victory? Without him we might perhaps give up. Having an enemy stimulates us, gives us strength. In him we hope to defeat the universe and the malevolence of fate.”

— Georges Rodenbach

33. “Is that not what makes it great?′ he retorted to his friend. ‘Its beauty resides in its silence, and its glory in now only belonging to a few priests and poor people, that is to say to those who are purest because they have renounced the world. Its higher destiny is to be something which has outlived its time.”

— Georges Rodenbach

34. “They needed to take action, make haste, embalm the dead town, dress the wounds of the sculptures, heal the sick windows, give succour to the ageing walls.”

— Georges Rodenbach

35. “Contemporary architecture was of necessity mediocre.”

— Georges Rodenbach

36. “It is precisely resemblance that reconciles habit and novelty, balancing them out, fusing them at some indefinite point, acting as their horizon line.”

— Georges Rodenbach

37. “What an austere landscape! Borluut was alone, with nothing but the sky and water. No footsteps, apart from his own, marked the immense expanse, the white desert which this ancient outer harbour of Bruges now was.”

— Georges Rodenbach

38. “Nothing goes unobserved in that strict town where people lack occupation. Malicious curiosity there has even invented what is known as a busybody, that is a double mirror fixed to the outside of the windowledge so that the streets can be monitored even from inside the houses, all the comings and goings watched, a kind of trap to catch all the exits and entrances the encounters and gestures that do not realize they are being observed, the looks that prove everything.”

— Georges Rodenbach