Bohemia Quotes

• It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Education, Mistake, Math

  "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)

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• I'm a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian.

  Brigitte Bardot

  Girl, Good Day, One Day

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• You see, but you do not observe.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Curiosity, Statistics, Detectives

  "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)

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• Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Philosophy, Majority

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• My dream is to become a farmer. Just a Bohemian guy pulling up his own sweet potatoes for dinner.

  Lenny Kravitz

  Dream, Sweet, Guy

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• Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

  Tennessee Williams

  Banner, Discretion

  Tennessee Williams (2008). “Camino Real”, p.49, New Directions Publishing

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• As a kid I quite fancied the romantic, Bohemian idea of being an artist. I expect I thought I could escape from the difficulties of maths and spelling. Maybe I thought I would avoid the judgement of the establishment.

  Peter Wright

  Romantic, Kids, Math

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• Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Aristocracy, Revolution, Members

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• To the extent that I can still believe in Bohemia, which I think is very important to me in some way that I don't yet really understand, to the extent that I still believe in that, I have to believe that there are viable degrees of freedom inherent if not realized in interstitial areas.

  William Gibson

  Believe, Thinking, Important

  Source: craphound.com

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• Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Class, America, Alive

  Cynthia Ozick (1987). “The Messiah of Stockholm: a novel”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.

  Lewis Hyde

  Artist, Library, World

  Lewis Hyde (2009). “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World”, p.67, Vintage

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• It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Mistake, Math, Science

  "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)

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• The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever -- in short, to be the bohemian.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Cutting, Artist, Forever

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• Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.

  Marge Piercy

  Love, Hair, Long

  Marge Piercy (2013). “Braided Lives”, p.68, PM Press

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• It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

  Jack Kerouac

  Writing, Peculiar, Elements

  The New York Journal-American, December 8, 1960.

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• If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.

  Douglas Coupland

  Fear, Twilight, People

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• Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.

  Milan Kundera

  Tombstone, Flower, Garden

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• Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.

  Josef Skvorecky

  Holocaust, Important, Fiction

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• We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

  David Amram

  Art, Reading, Museums

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• There's a part of bohemia I love. The lack of prejudice, the lack of aggression, I love the lack, for the most part, of competitiveness. It's more peaceful.

  Peter Mullan

  Peaceful, Prejudice, Aggression

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• Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.

  O. Henry

  Country, Moving, Trying

  O. Henry (2016). “The Complete Works Of O. Henry”, p.517, ShandonPress

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• I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

  Gustav Mahler

  Austria, World, Homeless

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures... and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy.

  James Branch Cabell

  Liars, Lying, Past

  "On Telling the Truth". William and Mary College Monthly, Volume VII (pp. 53-55), November 1897.

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• There are no roads in all Bohemia !

  Gelett Burgess

  "The Romance of the Commonplace". Book by Gelett Burgess, "Where is Bohemia?", 1902.

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• Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia.

  Jan Morris

  Home, Land, Europe

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