Some Romanian quotations

The Romanians possess to the highest degree the capacity of receiving the blows of fate while relaxed. They fall artfully, soft and loose in every joint and muscle as only those trained in falling can be. The secret of the art of falling is, of course, not to be afraid of falling and the Romanians are not afraid, as Western people are. Long experience has taught them that each fall may result in unforeseen opportunities and that somehow they always get on their feet again.

Countess Waldeck

Athene Palace(1943)

Those who hold no position in government, spend their time in absolute idleness, or in visiting each other to kill time.....In their habitual state of inaction, brought on by a natural aversion to every serious occupation which does not immediately relate to their personal interest, both sexes, enjoying the most extensive freedom of intercourse with each other, are easily led to clandestine connexion: the matrimonial faith has become merely nominal.

William Wilkinson

An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820)

I think that if Romania came one day by a miracle to get rid of all its sins and the faults of its leading political class and if, as if by magic, it gave up its selfishness, intrigue, corruption, incompetence and its scorn for the masses, still, even in that situation, this country could not make good progress if our political personalities did not get rid of their lack of seriousness.

Mihail Manoilescu

Memoirs (1927)

So exorbitant was this demand as virtually to amount to all the herds of Wallachia. The collectors were ordered to levy the increased tax within the brief space of ten days, and employed very severe measures, not stopping short of torture. When at last despairing protests were made before the palace - in itself a most unusual event - the prince [Constantin Hangerli] appeared at a window and called out angrily, 'Pay the taxes and you won't be killed'.

....An emissary was sent from the Porte to Bucarest, accompanied by a tall negro executioner. Forcing his way into the palace and into the very presence of the hospodar, he produced a firman of the sultan and ordered the negro to strangle the wretched Hangerli then and there, before the eyes of his terrified guards (1 March 1799).When some of the boiars rushed in, they found the prince's head had been hacked off, and the room was deluged with blood.

R.W Seton-Watson

A History of the Roumanians (1934)

Religion in Romania means something entirely different from what it means in Catholic or Protestant countries.


Eugene Ionesco


The Paris of the Balkans, apart from an economizing on electricity of an evening that does not exactly make it a Ville Lumiere, represents, as one proceeds in a south-easterly direction, a further, and profane, emanation of the gradual decline of the image of the City, capital of France and of the nineteenth century, and indeed of Europe.

Claudio Magris

Danube (1986)

As a collective personality, the Romanians are Oriental in their souls although Latin on the surface. Their patience is almost unending but they are quick to explode in argument; they are peace-loving yet would disintegrate without controversy. They are passive but strong in their resistance; spontaneously adaptable, still difficult t influence. They are romantic but never escape from reality.
They are charming yet cruel in their ridicule, warmly emotional but calculating, generous yet concentrate on the ‘main chance.’ They are opportunistic but lose interest after they have gained the advantage; they seize the moment, still adopt the long view.

Donald Dunham

In the Balkans, upon the passing of the Christian régime to the Turks, the old system was preserved under the new masters without any essential change. But in Roumania the recognition of Turkish suzerainty by the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia did not connote a curtailment of their authority. These princes continued as the natural protectors of the Oriental Church, with the patriarchs of Antiochia, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinople ranging themsleves under their guidance. As the crowned heads of all Orthodoxy, they ruled unhampered by any immixture of Turkish authority, then limited to the fortresses of the Danube which were considered the possessions of the Sultans. Thus is explained why Turkish pashas commanded at Buda, but never in the Roumanian capitals, where the cross remained at the pinnacle of the political organization. And yet, historians continue to group the Romanians with the "Balkan Christians" who broke their fetters and became free at about the same time, as though Romanian freedom had ever been interrupted during the nearly five hundred years of vassalage under the Sultans.


Nicolae Iorga


Men of experience assert that Bukharest is a wickeder city than Budapest, and that is saying a great deal.

Around the Black Sea (1911)

William Curtis

The riders are all very gallant and debonair; the ladies sparkle like jewels; languid beauties recline in their cars and survey the scene between half-closed eyelids.

In Gypsy Camp and Royal Palace (1924)

Emil Hoppe

In much knowledge there is also much grief.

Queen Marie of Romania

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a "will to renewal." This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is  nothing but a succession of "crises" -- of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no "crisis," there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.

Eugen Ionesco


Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Emil Cioran

What will be the physiognomy of painting, of

  poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one

  can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of

  Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by

  the exhaustion of consciousness itself.

  Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a

  second naiveté, without which the arts can

  never begin again. 

          

Emil Cioran

The Trouble with Being Born

In certain men, everything, absolutely  everything, derives from physiology: their

  body is their mind, their mind is their body. 

Emil Cioran

The Trouble with Being Born

This little blind creature, only a few days old, turning its head every which way in search of something or other, this naked skull, this initial baldness, this tiny monkey that has sojourned for months in a latrine and that soon, forgetting its origins, will spit on the galaxies. 

Emil Cioran

Drawn and Quartered

  Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first

  man would have adapted to it; this world is no

  less so, since here we regret paradise or

  anticipate another one. What to do? where to

  go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough. 

 Emil Cioran

The Trouble with Being Born