Vienna Quotes

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

2. "You know, it's very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following the crisis in Cuba, following the Khrushchev - beating down of Jack Kennedy in Vienna, that President Kennedy believed that we had to join the battle for the Third World, and the next crisis that developed in that regards was Vietnam."
Author: Alexander Haig

3. "For almost thirty years I repeatedly saw one and the same dream: I would arrive in Vienna at long last. I would feel really happy, for I was returning to my serene childhood."
Author: Alfred Schnittke

4. "In 1979, when I was toddler, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and my whole family fled to Vienna, Virginia. Far from home, my parents were determined to raise my two sisters and me according to Afghan traditions."
Author: Azita Ghanizada

5. "From time to time, the Vienna Philharmonic could play without a conductor because they are so good."
Author: Bernard Arnault

6. "Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize... Vienna waits for you."
Author: Billy Joel

7. "Tonight the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come marched in goose-step and raised a hand to salute "Heil Hitler!" Tonight the ghost wore a swastika on his armband instead of the simple red and white colors of Austria. And yet, on this silent night, the horrible specter seemed all but invisible in Vienna. Murphy could only wonder if he was the sole person at Sacher's who could hear the anthem of Hitler's hordes echoing distantly from beyond the mountains."
Author: Bodie Thoene

8. "3 May. Bistritz. —Left Munich at 8:35 P. M, on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible."
Author: Bram Stoker

9. "Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of My Dinner with Andre is "Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat dinner." The entire plot of Before Sunrise is "Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna." But the dialogue takes us everywhere, and as Roger Ebert notes, of My Dinner with Andre, these films may be paradoxically among the most visually stimulating in the history of the cinema:"
Author: Brian Christian

10. "Strauss! Oh yes, he was so-so. He wrote pretty music- The Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods. But what is that compared to Mozart?'Suddenly, Bess and George spotted Nancy coming towards them. 'Nancy!' the cousins chimed simultaneously and raced toward her.'I see our bus driver is still at it.' Nancy grinned.'All the way from Salzburg." George groaned.'Did he run off the road again?''Not once but many times,' Bess said. 'It was awful. Once he got so angry because someone compared Beethoven to Mozart that he actually stopped the bus, ran outside, and shouted into the valley, Beethoven is a bore. Mozart is sublime. Over and over. The professor had to go out and drag him back to the bus."
Author: Carolyn Keene

11. "Do you want to go back to Vienna?" he said.Alec didn't answer, just stared into space."Or we could go somewhere else," said Magnus. "Anywhere you want. Thailand, South Carolina, Brazil, Peru – Oh, wait, no, I'm banned from Peru. I'd forgotten about that. It's a long story, but amusing if you want to hear it."
Author: Cassandra Clare

12. "But the truth was that I didn't want to stay in Riley. The pulls of familial love and obligation could not, for the moment, compete with the promise of early-relationship sex. Starlight and beer and our twisting, naked bodies--that was what I wanted, not a seat at a dining room table with two old women eating breaded veal cutlets and Vienna torte."
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld

13. "A representational photograph says, 'This is what Vienna looked like.' An interpretational photograph goes one better and says, 'This is what Vienna was like. This is how I felt about it."
Author: David DuChemin

14. "Concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More's Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? "Here," declaimed Mr."
Author: David Mitchell

15. "If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead."
Author: Erich Von Stroheim

16. "For my Vienna is as different from what they call Vienna now as the quick is different from the dead."
Author: Erich Von Stroheim

17. "What impressed me particularly in Vienna was the strict order everywhere. No mob disturbances of any kind, in spite of the greatly increased liberty and relaxation of police regulations."
Author: Fritz Kreisler

18. "I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

19. "Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect."
Author: Gyorgy Ligeti

20. "My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris."
Author: Harry Mathews

21. "Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren."
Author: Ian Hacking

22. "In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious."
Author: Karl Kraus

23. "After the first exams, I switched to the Faculty of Philosophy and studied Zoology in Munich and Vienna."
Author: Karl Von Frisch

24. "I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine."
Author: Karl Von Frisch

25. "I received my doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1910."
Author: Karl Von Frisch

26. "We came to Vienna to find this"-she pointed-"the desired thing. But we're running out of time and we don't know what it is or where to find it.""Now splendid. You've come to the right place.""I knew it!" Arriane crowed. She leaned back into her chair and slapped Annabelle, who was politely nibbling at a scone, on the back. "As soon as I saw you, I knew we'd be okay. You have the desideratum, don't you?""No, dear." Dee shook her head."Then…what?" Daniel asked."I am the desideratum." She beamed. "I've been waiting such a long time to be called into service."
Author: Lauren Kate

27. "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."
Author: Leon Askin

28. "And I'll dance with you in Vienna,I'll be wearing a river's disguise.The hyacinth wild on my shouldermy mouth on the dew of your thighs.And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,with the photographs there and the moss.And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,my cheap violin and my cross."
Author: Leonard Cohen

29. "I am an Egyptian Muslim, educated in Cairo and New York, and now living in Vienna. My wife and I have spent half our lives in the North, half in the South. And we have experienced first hand the unique nature of the human family and the common values we all share."
Author: Mohamed ElBaradei

30. "Vienna is the gate to Eastern Europe."
Author: Niki Lauda

31. "I employ 20 people in Vienna. The other 130 coworkers are pilots and flight companions. The Overhead is limited with me. Reduces naturally the costs of my fliers."
Author: Niki Lauda

32. "This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Author: Oliver James

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

34. "As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit."
Author: Peter Morgan

35. "It's finger time!" Steve simply grunted.Li responded like she always had to the request over the past years, by walking over to the tall oak cabinet in his office and pulling out a pack of Vienna Fingers. She then closed the door and walked around the desk and dropped to her knees, crawling the few extra feet under his desk. Li handed the red and white plastic package of cookies to Steve, who slid the tray open while his virtual slave unzipped the trousers of his blue Armani pinstripe suit and then dug deep to find his pleasure source.Twenty seconds later, when both of them had consumed their mid-afternoon snacks, Steve transitioned back into his unrelenting work persona."
Author: Phil Wohl

36. "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. And Vienna was like another friend. When it rained in the tropics, I always heard the voice of Vienna. And at other times too. Sometimes deep in the virgin forests I smelled the musty smell of the entrance hall in Hietzing. Music and everything I loved was in the stones of Vienna, and in people's glances and their behavior, the way pure feelings are part of one's very heart. You know when the feelings stop hurting. Vienna in winter and spring. The allés in Schönbrunn. The blue light in the dormitory at the academy, the great white stairwell with the baroque statue. Morning ridings in the Prater. The mildew in the riding school. I remember all of it exactly, and I wanted to see it again..."
Author: Sándor Márai

37. "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."
Author: Sándor Márai

38. "I was born in Romania and later lived in Vienna, Austria, for a few years, and I eventually made my way over to New York in '95."
Author: Sebastian Stan

39. "But since those days in Vienna I had been aware that Austria was lost, not yet suspecting, to be sure, how much I had lost thereby."
Author: Stefan Zweig

40. "In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave."
Author: Stefan Zweig

41. "The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face."
Author: Stephen Fry

42. "You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas."
Author: Steven Pressfield

43. "There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it."
Author: Terry Eagleton

44. "I'm sure that being an applicant from the American School in Vienna helped get me into all seven colleges I applied to."
Author: Thomas G. Stemberg

45. "He walked upon 'earth that is as unsteady as the sea,' and found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery a sack of hair, blonde and black."
Author: Timothy Snyder

46. "But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud."
Author: Tony Kushner

47. "I would be delighted to show my film in the Viennale. I do not offer press kits. I do not offer stills. I do not offer screeners. I do not offer DVD's. I do not offer posters. I require a first-class flight to bring the print however I do not offer any photo ops or press exchange in any way. My fee for showing my film is $35,000 dollars US."
Author: Vincent Gallo

48. "I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view."
Author: Walter Kohn

49. "For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!"
Author: Wilhelm Reich

50. "Emily Dickinson was wrong: hope is not the thing with feathers. The thing with feathers is my cousin. We're sending him to a specialist in Vienna."
Author: Woody Allen

Vienna Quotes Pictures