Lydia

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.

(Latin Proverb)

At the touch of a lover everyone becomes a poet.

(Plato)

Winter Oaks

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

(Thomas Carlyle)

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. 

(Henry David Thoreau)

Vienna

When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.

(Franz Schubert)

With the coming of spring, I am calm again.

(Gustav Mahler)

Merry Christmas

Vienna

Whoever wants to know something about me as an artist which alone is significant. They should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.

(Gustav Klimt)

Something unpractical cannot be beautiful.

(Otto Wagner)

Vienna

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence. 

(Sigmund Freud)

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

(Adolf Hitler)

Vienna

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

(Karl Kraus)

God gives the wheat. He doesn't bake the bread.

(Austrian Proverb)

Bruges

In the market place of Bruges stands the Belfry old and brown;

Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded, still it watches o'er the town.

(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Belfry of Bruges)

As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave...overtook him with unwanted intensity.

(Georges Rodenbach. Bruges-La-Morte)