Vienna City Quotes & Sayings

Vienna is a handsome, lively city, and pleases me exceedingly. — Frederic Chopin

The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself. — Adolf Loos

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration. — Edith Hahn Beer

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East's exuberant vision of the West, the West's uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna - the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation. — M. John Harrison

Vienna, to me it was the tuning fork for the entire world. Saying the word Vienna was like striking a tuning fork and then listening to find what tone it called forth in the person I was talking to. It was how I tested people. If there was no response, this was not the kind of person I liked. Vienna wasn't just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one's soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend. — Sandor Marai

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him. — Eric Weiner

1988 I also received from the city of Vienna the cross of honour for art and science. These titles and the various honors mean a great deal to me, most of all for the reason that they would mean a great deal to my parents too. — Leon Askin

My homeland,' says the guest, 'no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What's left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything's come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away. — Sandor Marai

The city (of Vienna) had an unerring tradition of celebrating some of it's greatest composers after it had around them to die in poverty. — Charles Emmerson

I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born. — Eric Kandel

My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values. — Eric Kandel

The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released ... At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food - Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend - the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I've ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young. — Langdon Winner

My parents were not born in Vienna, but they had spent much of their lives there, having each come to the city at the beginning of World War I when they were still very young. — Eric Kandel