Viennese Quotes & Sayings

Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. — Thomas Merton

I realized that I had to rebuild my foundation. I had a choice about how to see my life: I could look only at the negative or I could emphasise the positive. It took all the energy I could muster to accept that my miscarriage had happened for a reason. — Zara Phillips

The expression on my face - who on earth would be interested in that? All that I have to say is to be found in my works. (On being photographed) — Pierre Bonnard

Among the numerous pleasures of Vienna the hotel evenings are famous. During supper Strauss or Lanner play waltzes ... After every waltz they get huge applause; and if they play a Quodlibet, or jumble of opera, song and dance, the hearers are so overjoyed that they don't know what to do with themselves. It shows the corrupt taste of the Viennese public. — Frederic Chopin

My tastes are Viennese. — Zubin Mehta

The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language. — Leon Uris

copies were passed to the cryptanalysts, who sat in little kiosks, ready to tease out the meanings of the messages. As well as supplying the emperors of Austria with invaluable intelligence, the Viennese Black Chamber sold the information it harvested to other powers in Europe. In 1774 an — Simon Singh

The situation is desperate," runs an old Viennese saying, "but not serious. — Jan Swafford

Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.) — Siddhartha Mukherjee

When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book. — Craig Nelson

Every time you borrow money, you're robbing your future self. — Nathan W. Morris

I'm surprised that Hollywood and networks have not been diverse as other industries. — Spike Lee

But you must remember that they are Viennese and nobody is good enough for the Viennese. — Daisy Goodwin

My painting is not violent, it's life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death. — Francis Bacon

Little girl, this ain't foreplay. This is me making every inch of you mine. — Aden Lowe

The Viennese wash everything. Where else in the world does the government hire public servants to wash public telephone booths and the glass over traffic lights? Every time I see someone doing these things, I smile like a child. — Jonathan Carroll

If I tell the Berliners to step forward, they do it. If I tell the Viennese to step forward, they do it, but then they ask why. — Herbert Von Karajan

The coffeehouse is good for genius, and the Viennese coffeehouse is a classic case. Freud had his favorite coffee shop, and so did Gustav Klimt. — Eric Weiner

weak-chinned balding man in his late forties wearing a department-store suit and a mackintosh coat. He was the sort of man that young women instinctively avoided — Daniel Silva

Even among Sedlacek's own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railroads, and enormous cubic footage of cargo space, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research-and-development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one. — Thomas Keneally

and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture. — Stefan Zweig

I believe ... this is my final word ... I believe that I'm supporting the Constitution of the United States which does not give the right for any individual to own a handgun ... — Jan Schakowsky

Live and let live was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes. — Stefan Zweig

Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing. — Rachel Zucker

If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature. — Gore Vidal

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare. — Orhan Pamuk

The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

I think that that integrity is something that is important to voters. — Tammy Baldwin

I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman. — Peter Morgan

The coffee shop played a big role in Vienna of 1900. Rents were sky high, housing was difficult to come by, your apartment probably wasn't heated, and so you went to the coffee shop. You went to the coffee shop because it was warm, because it was great Viennese coffee, and you went for the conversation and the company. — Eric Weiner

The lawyer was Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of a venerated Viennese composer who had fled the rise of Hitler. The return of this ominous heir was anything but welcome. The painting Schoenberg sought was a shimmering gold masterpiece, painted a century earlier, by the artistic heretic Gustav Klimt. It was a portrait of a Viennese society beauty, Adele Bloch-Bauer. — Anne-Marie O'Connor

That is, " Harry said, " because the world has never seen - in initiative, imagination, courage, and steadfastness - anything like the American fighting man. Not the Germans, the non-Germans, the semi-German Viennese, the British, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Danish, or the Nepalese. You may in the future condemn us for it. You may continue to think that we are savage, disproportionate, and uncivilized. But we saved you the last time. And it is we, I guarantee you, will will liberate Paris and drive into Berlin. We don't like it. We don't like fighting and dying. But ... when it comes time for that, we are facile princeps, and will always be. We were born for it. The terrain of the New World educated us in it. That in America every man is a king assures us of it. — Mark Helprin

The Austrian School came into existence when a bunch of Viennese rent-gouging landlords didn't want rent control on the rents they could gouge out of their tenants in old Vienna, so they hired a bunch of scribblers - and that's the Austrian School. — Webster Tarpley

Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word 'Jew,' with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions ... For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation. — Adolf Hitler

Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You. In that book he says: 'It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.' You — Dale Carnegie

My small experience on 'Dancing with the Stars' allowed me to slowly appreciate the Waltz and Viennese Waltz, but to see it in Vienna is something much different. — Apolo Ohno

Yes, in baseball when the team stinks, you fire the manager. But you don't fire him because it rains. And you don't let the opposing team choose a new manager for you. And you don't fire him between innings. And replace him with a Viennese weightlifter. — Bill Maher

Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word. — Ian Shoales

See with the eyes of love and a thing becomes beautiful. See with the eyes of hate and things are ugly. — Joy Cowley