Quotes & Sayings About Bohemia

The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual. — Pankaj Mishra

The monasteries of Bohemia demand more of their brotherhood than some are prepared to give. The daily routine of back-breaking idleness proves too much for certain novices. The self-inflicted orgies that are the inevitable punishment for the slightest deviation into the bourgeois way of life are more than their frail flesh can stand. Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots, and greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope — Quentin Crisp

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles ... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.. — Milan Kundera

I'd rather live in Bohemia than in any other land. — John Boyle O'Reilly

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion. — Tennessee Williams

I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins. — Bayard Taylor

If Prague and the rest of Bohemia, with all their charming hospodas delightful architecture and pretty landscape should become too cosy for you, Ostrava, the Czech Republic's third largest city with about 330,000 inhabitants, will rapidly cure your spleen. Tucked away in the country's northeastern corner on the border between Moravia, Silesia and Poland, the former Czechoslovakia's "heart of steel" offers the true flair of the Wild East. As an Australian probably would have put it, this is a city where men are men, and sheep are nervous. — Terje B. Englund

And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Cesky Krumlov, the little jewel box of a city in southern Bohemia. — Laini Taylor

It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that. — Michael Chabon

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb. — Cynthia Ozick

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings. — David Amram

Milena - what a rich heavy name, almost too full to be lifted, and in the beginning I didn't like it much, it seemed to me a Greek or Roman gone astray in Bohemia, violated by Czech, cheated of its accent, and yet in colour and form it is marvellously a woman, a woman whom one carries in one's arms out of the world, and out of the fire, I don't know which, and she presses herself willingly and trustingly into your arms. — Franz Kafka

There would be no bohemia without smoking. — David Hockney

Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills. — O. Henry

Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy — Kenneth Rexroth

The paper was made in Bohemia," I said. "Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence - 'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts. — Arthur Conan Doyle

LEONTES Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh? - a note infallible Of breaking honesty; - horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift; Hours, minutes; noon, midnight? and all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, That would unseen be wicked? - is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing; The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; My is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. — William Shakespeare

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything. — Milan Kundera

There's very little bohemia in Australia and it's one of the things I miss most about not living in Europe. — Rachel Ward

In 1939, Hitler expanded the German Navy and, in violation of the Munich Agreement, occupied parts of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Germany then established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This protectorate included those portions of Czechoslovakia that had not already been incorporated into Germany. On August 30, 1939, the German Reich issued an ultimatum to Poland concerning the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. On September 1st, without waiting for a response to its ultimatum, Germany invaded Poland. Much to Hitler's surprise, England honored its treaty with Poland. Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, thereby ushering in another World War. Officially, "The Second World War" in Europe was started by the German Reich when it attacked Poland, although at the time Germany blamed the Treaty of Versailles. — Hank Bracker

Oxford, where the real and the unreal jostle in the streets; where North Parade is in the south and South Parade is in the north, where Paradise is lost under a pumping station; where the river mists have a solvent and vivifying effect on the stone of the ancient buildings, so that the gargoyles of Magdalen College climb down at night and fight with those from Wykeham, or fish under the bridges, or simply change their expressions overnight; Oxford, where windows open into other worlds ...
Oscar Baedecker, The Coasts of Bohemia — Philip Pullman

Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian? — Djuna Barnes

I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed. — Gustav Mahler

Preserve there [bohemia] a hidden seed to glorify thy name. — John Amos Comenius

Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia. — Jan Morris

There is no normal, not really. Not a right and a wrong way to be. But there is belonging. That day in Bohemia with Jeremey and David and the girls, I belonged. I belonged as much as anybody on the mean. Maybe even a little bit more. — Heidi Cullinan

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what ... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now. — Douglas Coupland

The closing period of the fifteenth century witnessed the slow but sure increase of the churches of the Brethren. Although far from being unmolested, they yet enjoyed comparative rest. At the commencement of the sixteenth century their churches numbered two hundred in Bohemia and Moravia. — Ezra Hall Gillett

You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh ... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York. — Jay McInerney

If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures ... and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy. — James Branch Cabell

I can assure the Marquis de Chasteler that it is my unalterable determination never to set foot on any territory which acknowledges obedience to His Majesty the King of Bohemia and Hungary. — Marquis De Lafayette

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

Aomame imagined the carefree winds sweeping across the plains of Bohemia and thought about the vicissitudes of history. — Haruki Murakami

There are no roads in all Bohemia ! — Gelett Burgess

When you're no one from nowhere it's best to know your limits. Rich kids can play at bohemia, but wealth has long tendrils; it twines into a safety net which can also be a trap for the unprepared. Rich kids have families and backgrounds and connections, and they ask questions, because their world functions on being able to place people. I couldn't expose myself to that. — L.S. Hilton

If she had ever once in her life given the realities of life in seventeenth-century Bohemia a fleeting thought - and she most certainly had not - she would have pictured a world of superstition and suffering where obscenely rich and powerful aristocrats oppressed the miserable mass of grimy peasants whose lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Yet the folk she observed bustling around her, while admittedly grimy and short, seemed a fairly happy lot - judging solely from the air of amiable bonhomie permeating the Old Town square. Everywhere she looked, people were smiling, laughing, greeting one another with formal handshakes and kisses. — Stephen R. Lawhead

One night
it was on the twentieth of March, 1888
I was returning from a journey to a patient(for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door ... I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problems. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life. — Alain De Botton

There's a part of bohemia I love. The lack of prejudice, the lack of aggression, I love the lack, for the most part, of competitiveness. It's more peaceful. — Peter Mullan

The neighborhood-towns were part of larger ethnic states. To the north of the Loop was Germany. To the northwest was Poland. To the west were Italy and Israel. To the southwest were Bohemia and Lithuania. And to the south was ireland ...
you could always tell, even with your eyes closed, which state you were in by the odors of the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the foreign or familiar language, and by whether a stranger hit you in the head with a rock. — Mike Royko

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia. — Marc Almond

I would have preferred to be successful here with a piece that cost me a huge amount of money and effort ... rather than sending to Bohemia some ordinary works. — Camille Claudel

The Upper Bohemia people wore tuxedos in an art gallery, and Lower Bohemia was all of us. — David Amram

If I had been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others ... I wouldn't have been impelled to live in New York and choose the hard poverty of bohemia over the soft comfort of the business world. — Edmund White

This is of course the Prince of Wales's motto to this day, though subsequent princes have not adopted John of Bohemia's custom of fighting while tied up and blind. — Stephen Clarke

I sat with my toes buried in the warm yellow sand staring out towards the back door of The East. Pacific Ocean Blue was playing in the background and it had left me in a state of Bohemia as the waves crashed ashore; roaring as loud as lions. — David Louden