Quotes by Luxembourgish Authors

The boy and girl going hand in hand through a meadow the mother washing her baby the sweet simple things in life. We have almost lost track of them. On the one side we overintel-lectualize everything on the other hand we are over-mechanized. We can understand the danger of the atomic bomb but the danger of our misunderstanding the meaning of life is much more serious.

Edward Steichen

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face - the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

Leon Krier

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.

Leon Krier

Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.

Leon Krier

The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.

Leon Krier

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.

Leon Krier

Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both consumers and disseminators of the untried action-ideas.Oscar Wilde and Stefan George were perhaps most representative of the aristocratizing aesthetes whose rush into dandyism or retreat into cultural monasticism was part of the outburst against bourgeois philistinism and social levelling. Their yearning for a return to an aristocratic past and their aversion to the invasive democracy of their day were shared by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose nostalgia for the presumably superior sensibilities of a bygone cultivated society was part of their claim to privileged social space and position in the present. Although they were all of burgher or bourgeois descent, they extolled ultra-patrician values and poses, thereby reflecting and advancing the rediscovery and reaffirmation of the merits and necessities of elitism. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic and unpolitical posture precisely because they knowingly contributed to the exaltation of societal hierarchy at a time when this exaltation was being used to do battle against both liberty and equality. At any rate, they may be said to have condoned this partisan attack by not explicitly distancing themselves from it.Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were not nearly so self-effacing. They were not only conspicuous and active militants of antidemocratic elitism, but they meant their literary works to convert the reader to their strident persuasion. Their polemical statements and their novels promoted the cult of the superior self and nation, in which the Church performed the holy sacraments. Barrès, Bourget, and D'Annunzio were purposeful practitioners of the irruptive politics of nostalgia that called for the restoration of enlightened absolutism, hierarchical society. and elite culture in the energizing fires of war.

Arno J. Mayer

He was in conflict with himself. There was no enjoyment in the thought that he had escaped a great danger, and in the midst of his uneasy reflections he had a sudden breathless conviction that she made him feel old because he loved her. Then he felt a hatred of himself, gathering into one mighty heap all the fierce and bitter hatred he had cherished for others and pouring it out on himself.

Norbert Jacques

We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.

Jean-Claude Juncker

I like the imp / in impossibility

Pierre Joris