It is Tuesday, time for Frizztext’s A-Z Photo Challenge. Letter this week is V and I am sharing photographs taken from the time I was in Vienna, truly a lovely city. In a few weeks’ time, I shall be visiting Europe again and it is nice to revisit the five days we spent in Austria. We were privileged to have such kind and generous hosts who took us around town. While I do not recall where the exact locations of these pictures are, suffice it to say that they were taken while walking around Vienna.
V is for Vienna
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
“Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?”
― Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
“The only thing–I tell you this straight from the heart–that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can’t have any proper social intercourse with those people–and that music does not have a better reputation…For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!…A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not–but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes–bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
“They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how ‘successful’ your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.”
― Jack Kerouac, Satori In Paris
“We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can “show off” and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
“Now, bring me that horizon.”
― Johnny Depp
you amused me with the MOZART-quotation: “A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not…” Mozart liked sarcasm! Also Karl Kraus, maybe even Sigmund Freud… – I like to watch news made in Vienna about Germany – of course they have more distance, skepticism and irony than the Germans talking about Germany …
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