Top 632 Quotes & Sayings by Hungarian Authors - Page 7

Life is only a long and bitter suicide, and faith alone can transform this suicide into a sacrifice.

'Rockaway Beach' is a great song, and so is 'Listen to My Heart.'

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

Bowie's 'Hunky Dory' influenced me. 'Ziggy Stardust' influenced Johnny Ramone a lot, especially his guitar parts.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra - not choreography to the audience.

We don't go against the will of the people.

Movement of people is taking place on an immense scale, and from a European perspective, the number of potential future immigrants seems limitless.

How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?

I also had a mistaken attitude towards certain comrades.

Now that I have called you on your false accusation, you are using additional smear tactics.

The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

Composers are not all good conductors.

The great day of the Fire-eater - or, should I say, the day of the great Fire-eater - has passed.

I am not pushy. You want it, you buy it. Most people hit the customer over the head. But if you're too self-important, it's kind of repellent.

I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.

Finally I'm becoming stupider no more.

I've been a loner all my life, so it didn't bother me that Hungarian was my first language and that I had to learn English. I had a pretty heavy accent in junior high school and would say things like 'wolume control' instead of 'volume control.'

The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.

If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.

I make the most money, I think, in Russia and Paris, for the people of those countries are so willing to be amused, so eager to see something new and out of the ordinary.

For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.

Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.

The character of a people may be ruined by charity.

Economic distress, political pressure, and social obloquy already drive us from our homes and from our graves. The Jews are already constantly shifting from place to place.

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society.

I never hated a man enough to give him diamonds back.

Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.

The principle of evil in Europe is the enervating spirit of Russian absolutism.

There's been rumors going round. I never confirm any of them.

There are hurts so deep that one cannot reach them or heal them with words.

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.

I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.

If I had undertaken the practical direction of military operations, and anything went amiss, I feared that my conscience would torture me, as guilty of the fall of my country, as I had not been familiar with military tactics.

Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.

When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.

We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization, can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.

The foodstuff, carbohydrate, is essentially a packet of hydrogen, a hydrogen supplier, a hydrogen donor, and the main event during its combustion is the splitting off of hydrogen.

I was a militant smoker, and in my case, I think I particularly used smoking because what I felt was a kind of politically correct big brother assault on smoking.

But we wish to give the Jews a Homeland. Not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by removing them carefully, roots and all, to a better terrain.

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

It seems like people don't learn from the past.

The closest things to an influence would be people like Charlie Watts or Al Jackson. But I didn't really listen to drummers; I basically played what I thought was needed for the Ramones.

When I first started out, I found it really hard to be rejected all the time. You invest in a casting, you prepare and get excited about it, then when I fail and don't get it, it makes me question whether I should be a model.

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

I make money using my brains and lose money listening to my heart. But in the long run my books balance pretty well.

Immortality. We all want to be remembered: We want to do things that will make people say, 'Isn't he wonderful?'

Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.

In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.

If I despised myself, it would be no compensation if everyone saluted me, and if I respect myself, it does not trouble me if others hold me lightly.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

In the mid-1970s, I was teaching design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest.

A good puzzle, it's a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It's very clear, and the problem depends just on you.

The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.

The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take.

Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.