Top 27 Albanian Quotes & Sayings

Fuehrer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today!

I live the Swiss mentality but the Kosovo mentality too, because when I go home, I speak Albanian.

I have a good relationship with the Albanian fans. But when you are called a traitor - that is such a harsh word. Most of the Albanian fans respect me. But 'traitor' is unacceptable considering the background of my family.

An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.

I am Albanian by birth. Now I am a citizen of India. I am also a Catholic nun. In my work, I belong to the whole world. But in my heart, I belong to Christ.

The fellows who amuze me are the Albanians. An Albanian on the mash is almost exactly like the medieval swells of the Italian frescoes & the first ones we met quite startled us. They wear the tight-fitting trunk hose made of woolen stuff hooked up the back of the leg. It is white with long black stripes of embroidery down the leg & at the top in front the shirt is pulled through slashes. They are long slim chaps with dandy little moustaches & are most theatrical in effect.

It is now necessary to face the truth and to acknowledge against all prejudices that the struggle that the Albanian tribe is leading today is a natural and unavoidable historic struggle for a different political life than that experienced under Turkish rule - different also from that which its neighbours Serbia, Greece and Montenegro would like to force upon the Albanians.

My mom grew up in Idaho, went to Brigham Young University: they're very Molly Mormon. And my father is, like, first generation Albanian, and his parents lived in Southey and grew up in downtown Boston. My parents are complete opposites.

I love eating at my dad's pub, the Queens Arms in Kilburn. It does a traditional Albanian spinach pie.

[My mother tongue is] Albanian. But, I am equally fluent in Bengali (language of Calcutta) and English.

I know that there's this one Albanian myth that's always reflected on, and I think it reflects on the actual core culture. That myth is called The Besa. B-E-S-A. The Besa is a word that Albanians use to mean avow, but it's such a strong promise, that even past death, one cannot break that promise. It is unfathomable. So if you give someone your besa, life or death, heaven or hell, you have to fulfill that besa.

Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty.

For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression - rich, malleable, adaptable. As I have said in my latest novel, 'Spiritus,' it has modalities that exist only in classical Greek, which puts one in touch with the mentality of antiquity.

Guidebooks used to write the name of my city in two ways: Gjirokaster in Albanian, and Argyrokastron for foreigners. The classical-sounding name somehow gave it better credentials, because people in the Balkans famously exaggerate and often call their villages cities.

Albanians love topiary and fancy doors. They speak Albanian, an Indo-European language with traces of Greek and Latin - and the lek is their monetary denomination, which trades at one hundred to one on the dollar. Their food is excellent, a melange of Greek, Turkish, and Italian cuisine, all very fresh and legume-y.

In antiquity, there were three regions in southern Europe: Greece, Rome, and Ilyria. Albanian is the only survivor of the Ilyrian languages. That is why it has always intrigued the great linguists of the past.

The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania.

Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that France was freer than ever during the German occupation, when people had no choices but one: to collaborate or to resist. I'm not saying there was something good about that system. But the freest people I've ever met, or knew about, belonged to that period. For example, Musine Kokalari, an Albanian writer who dared to fight for political pluralism and free elections. She created the first social democratic party, despite knowing the high price she would have to pay.

The film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] opens with an Albanian blood feud and goes on to delve into, for instance, prison systems, underpaid tomato pickers, the gulf oil spill. It's all woven together in a sensuous, oblique way that's not the same as the single-message kind of documentary we're used to, with an "answer" at the end. It's more like an exploration. Sort of like what you do with Birth of a Nation.

If we didn't have the Albanian entrepreneurial spirit and financial support from the diaspora, this stupid political class would have destroyed the country by now.

English was my fourth language. I arrived, I enrolled in public school, as a child, I believe I was about six years old when we finally landed in Michigan. And I was initially put in special education because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the English language because I was listening to Hungarian and Albanian and German. My mind broke down like I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fourth language.

They are strewn with the wreckage of dead Empires - past Powers - only the Albanian "goes on for ever."

There's a condensed softness about the Albanian people, and I've witnessed examples of their hospitality.

My faith is a very important part of my life. I do not feel that I have become president of this country by accident, but that I have been chosen because nobody can accuse me of favouring the Albanian Muslims or the Orthodox.

My mom cooks traditional Albanian food for every holiday. She's an amazing cook.

I want to show every part of me and every color of me. And I think, growing up Albanian, I wanted to bring that to light.