Top 146 Portuguese Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

In Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Angola and Cameroon maize is a staple, yet the earliest mention of maize in west Africa comes from a Portuguese document that lists it as being loaded on to slave ships bound for Africa.

I went to play in Brazil when I had just turned 18 and was the world's top junior player. I got to the airport, and no one knew who I was. I couldn't speak any Portuguese, and no one spoke English. Then someone said something that resembled 'tennis,' and I went with that.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.

The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese.

I was 14 years old. I did an audition for extra work as an actor, with two lines. Suddenly I was auditioning for a bigger role, and then got a part on a Portuguese TV series at age 15. My whole life changed completely.

Knowing English is important, but for us Venezuelans I think it would also be important to know Portuguese. For that reason, we should evaluate the possibility of it being taught in our schools.

To get to play alongside Cristiano and other very good Portuguese players makes me very proud, and I hope I can help inspire the next generation of nine-year-olds with painted faces, watching us in their own town squares.

Obviously, no-one's going to watch Belgian football. Nobody is going to watch Portuguese football. But I've played with some players who right now are killing it in the Premier League.

I don't know much about pop music, and we sample music from all different cultures. I was trained in West African dance, so my sense of rhythm when I move is obviously informed by that, and I obviously sing in Portuguese.

There aren't a lot of Portuguese models, so everyone always expects me to be Brazilian because of my features, sometimes even American, as I have a slight American accent when I speak English.

Wijnaldum always tries to do some jokes inside the dressing room. He's always winding people up. He always tries to speak in Portuguese or Spanish with us and dancing.

You go to Paris, or you go to Portugal, you go to Poland, and you ask, 'Who are you people?' They'll tell you, we're Portuguese, we're Spanish, we're Polish. Who are the people that are really European? The people in Brussels, in the E.U. bureaucracy. Europe has not been able to move to the level of patriotic identification with the concept.

Utah may well be the most cosmopolitan state in America. Vast numbers of young Mormons - increasingly women as well as men - spend a couple of years abroad as missionaries and return jabbering in Thai or Portuguese and bearing a wealth of international experience.

I'm English. I've never said the opposite. I'm 100 per cent English. In Portugal it happens that a lot of Brazilians play for Portugal and they're not Portuguese.

Growing up biracial and speaking four languages - French, Chinese, Portuguese, and English - gave me a different lens. I was always very acutely aware of coming from a different perspective. I think that definitely contributed to what I chose to do with my life.

I don't have any connection to Portuguese, but I listened to a lot of music in other languages because I was really into house music; there are all sorts of languages that are featured in house.

I'm half-Italian and my name is Portuguese. Michael Young is half-Mexican. There are players from the United States that have heritage elsewhere and it's a great thing to have a world cup to celebrate the whole world. It shows the world that baseball is important and how great the game is.

The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English- or German- or Portuguese- or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.

I did a lot of crazy gigs man. I hosted a Jack and Jill strip club in Woonsocket Rhode Island which is this tiny depressing fishing town, all Portuguese immigrants and it's just a humorless, dark town.

When I was young, living in Belgium, my parents spoke Portuguese, we have the Brazilian passion at home, I played with PSV in Holland, you experience all these different cultures and you get used to living with that. I think it has made me a better player and a better person to get out of my comfort zone.

My brother and I have matching tattoos on our arms. It says, 'Humility is strength,' in Portuguese and Italian, because my genius brother taught English in both Italy and Brazil.

My food is Louisiana, New Orleans-based, well-seasoned, rustic. I think it's pretty unique because of my background being influenced by my mom, Portuguese and French Canadian. There's a lot going on there.

I watched the Portuguese TV anchors talking about what was happening all over the world and I just thought they were so knowledgeable and the most interesting and incredible people in the world.

One of the dogs in the competition, a Portuguese Water Dog, is related to President Obama's dog, Bo. But they only see each other at funerals and weddings.

Over the years I've learnt to live with two persons in my heart. One is Edson, who has fun with his friends and family; the other is the football player Pele. I didn't want the name. 'Pele' sounds like baby-talk in Portuguese.

'Gulabo Sitabo' is the biggest release for me. The film is going to 203 countries simultaneously and it is successfully being subtitled in 20 languages including Portuguese, German, Spanish, Russian, French and many more.

At the time of independence in 1975, Mozambique was extremely poor. Many Portuguese residents abandoned the country, leaving only a handful of well-educated Mozambicans to try to run the country.

I speak a little Portuguese, but my daughter speaks it better than me. I always feel that Italy is my home, but it is important for my husband that we also live in France. Sometimes we live as a family all together, but as we are two working actors, sometimes we have to be apart. Sometimes I'm shooting a movie; sometimes he is.

But very unfortunately the merchant marine died away till even the majority of fishing done about the Cape is in the hands of the Portuguese who emigrated to the Cape some fifty years ago.

I looked at Manchester with more interest when Cristiano was here because it's normal when you have Portuguese players in some teams, you look at them more than other teams.

My feeling is that my body and all my things inside me - when I move, when I do everything - are Brazilian because my family is Brazilian, and my mother language is Brazilian Portuguese. But all the thinking in my life, all the treatment with people, I think I'm more from Spain. That's how I grew up.

I was one of the lucky people who found what I loved at a really young age. When I was 16, I got my first job in a Portuguese soap opera, and I realized how much I really loved it.

From the beginning however, there was resistence to Portuguese mastery over Kotte. While Dharmapala was alive there were two major revolts, one led by Akaragama Appuhamy in 1594, and the other by Edirille rala in 1594-96.

I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.

I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.

Every footballer has their own identity. A Uruguayan player is different to a Spanish player. A Portuguese player may be similar to a Spanish one, but not the same - and so on.

My Cape women are generally true to type - big hearted, motherly women who love the sea. My other characters, with the exception of the Portuguese, who I occasionally mention as Cape dwellers, are obviously drawn from the city types one sees in everyday life.

That image is now associated with the Portuguese coaches: the ability to adapt, to arrive and win, to assemble good teams and good structures is undoubtedly one of our brands and I think that's the main fact for which we are most respected around the world.

It is like sitting in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway with your windows rolled up and Portuguese music booming out of the surround-sound speakers while animals gnaw on your neck and diseased bill collectors hammer on your doors with golf clubs.

My inspiration was my mom. She's a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that.

When you're in Portuguese-African Brazil, or Lisbon, or Mozambique, sometimes piri piri is used as a condiment. Sometimes piri piri is just spices from a jar, and sometimes it's made with garlic, olive oil, cilantro, parsley, and some light chilies.

I keep boxes filled with recuerdos - little memories that are in the form of pictures and events that I've written down. It's funny that I chose to write them in Spanish rather than English or Portuguese.

If you ask me where do I belong, it would be somewhere in the Irish Sea almost - born in Hong Kong, Chinese mother, Portuguese father from Macao, lived in Europe most of my life.

Portuguese is the language of my heart; it's the language of my feelings. It's the language that I feel I can express myself best in.

I knew Portuguese football and I knew that Rio Ave was a medium-sized club but I also knew they are organised off the pitch. We felt that we could achieve something special playing in a different way.

Most of the games are decided by a small margin. That shows the intensity and the competitiveness of the English league. Everyone knows here the competition is ferocious. It's a bit different than the Portuguese league. But I'm going to try to adapt to this league as quick as possible.

Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ruins of old Baghdad. That was in 1604, and he's visiting the same street that I write about in the book, named after Abu Nuwas, though it wasn't called that back then.

I studied a lot from bossa nova, and I used to listen to it a lot as a kid because my mum would play it. I even wanted to learn Portuguese in high school so I could sing in it.

We might think we don't, but everyone descends from native Brazilians. When Portuguese arrived here, everyone was native Brazilians, so I have that in my blood.

The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans - all of the other major powers - keep slavery. And the fact is that it's almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire.

The acknowledgement that this person is English, white, or French, or German, this is Portuguese, this is Rwandan, this is Senegalese, this is a black South Africans is a glorious thing. To speak of those positively, to say that they have characteristics, each one of them, that the others almost always do not have, and that there is a complementarily about it.

These were African-Arab-Asian values. The only section of Europe that had a high value system during the Dark Ages was the, were those on the Iberian Peninsula in the Spanish-Portuguese area, southern France.

When I took part in European leaders summits, it was sometimes unpleasant for me to hear Romanian, Polish, Portuguese, and Italian friends speak English, although I admit that on an informal basis, first contacts can be made in this language. Nevertheless, I will defend everywhere the use of the French language.

At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.

To acknowledge that the biggest wave in the world might be a shore break off a little Portuguese town no one has ever heard of flies in the face of what passes for reason in the surf world.

I first came across her [Bae Suah] when I read some elderly male critic castigating her for 'doing violence to the Korean language', which of course was catnip to me, especially as I'd recently discovered Lispector doing pretty much the same to Portuguese.

Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

It's true that mostly in the last years, from the moment when Portugal was subjected to this policy of austerity, imposed by Europe, that I think many Portuguese became a little bit more left-leaning, and so did I too, I could not not care about the situation. I had to deal with it in some way.