Lisbon Portugal Quotes

Lisbon, to me, is the Lisbon of Pessoa. Just like London is Woolf’s, or rather, Mrs. Dalloway’s. Barcelona is Gaudí's and Rome is da Vinci’s. You see them in every crevice and hear their echoes in every cathedral. I’d like to be the child, or rather, the mother of a city but I neither have a home nor a resting place. My race is humankind. My religion is kindness. My work is love and, well, my city is the walls of your heart.

Already in the 1550s, 10% of Lisbon’s population were slaves; by 1800 there were close to a million slaves among the 2,500,000 or so inhabitants of Portugal’s Brazil.

I never told you about the trip to Portugal 3 years ago when I read Fernando Pessoa at 1 a.m. outside a small family-run restaurant by the harbour. If I close my eyes I can still smell the salt water and the fish, some sort of cleaning powder scent from the kitchen, can still feel the heat, a soft wind and me sitting with wide open eyes on my own at 1 a.m. writing what I thought was profound and excellent. I felt like a writer then. I was not a girlfriend or a daughter or a songwriter who never got signed—I was a writer in the truest sense and I lived in my own flames.

A saying still used in Portugal is Anda Mouro na costa (literally, “there are Moors off the coast”). It indicates that trouble is afoot,

A study by T. Joel Wade and Jennifer Slemp similarly found that the most effective flirtation tactics for women include touching, dressing in revealing clothing, moving closer, kissing on the cheek, and rubbing against the man.37 Effective nonverbal seduction tactics for women in Lisbon, Portugal, included wearing tight skirts, wearing low-neck blouses, and exposing legs through short skirts or wearing attention-getting black or red nylons.38 Women who sexualize their appearance and behavior succeed in evoking approaches from men.

For pure, focused devastation, however, probably the most intense earthquake in recorded history was one that struck–and essentially shook to pieces–Lisbon, Portugal, on All Saints Day (1 November), 1755. Just before ten in the morning, the city was hit by a sudden sideways lurch now estimated at magnitude 9.0 and shaken ferociously for seven full minutes. When at last the motion ceased, survivors enjoyed just three minutes of calm before a second shock came, only slightly less severe than the first. A third and final shock followed. The convulsive force was so great that the water rushed out of the city’s harbour and returned in a wave over 15 metres high, adding to the destruction. At the end of it all, sixty thousand people were dead7 and virtually every building for miles reduced to rubble. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for comparison, measured an estimated 7.8 on the Richter scale and lasted less than thirty seconds.

Unfortunately, on Christmas morning 1492 the Santa María ran aground on the northern coast of what is now Haiti. Not having any way to refloat her, the crew off-loaded the provisions and equipment from the ship before she broke up. For protection they then built a flimsy fortification on the beach, calling it “La Navidad.” With the consent of the local Indian Chief, Columbus left behind 39 men with orders to establish a settlement, and appointed Diego de Arana, a cousin of his mistress Beatriz, as the Governor. On January 16, 1493, Columbus left Navidad and sailed for Portugal and Spain on the Niña. Everything went well until the two remaining ships, the Niña and the Pinta, became separated from each other. Columbus was convinced that the captain of the faster Pinta would get back to Spain first, thereby garnering all the glory by telling lies about him and his discoveries. On March 4th, a violent storm off the Azores forced him to take refuge in Lisbon. Both ships, amazingly enough, arrived there safely. A week later, Columbus continued on to Palos, Spain, on the Gulf of Cádiz, from whence he had started. Finally, on March 15th, he arrived in Barcelona. It seems that all’s well that ends well, because he was hailed a hero and news of his discovery of new lands spread throughout Europe like wildfire.

The coast of Maine has many fishing villages and old seaports, and its past is steeped in maritime history. Twelve miles from Bath, we came into Wiscasset, known for the wrecks of two old sailing vessels: the four-masted cargo schooners the Hesper and the Luther Little. The Hesper was launched on the 4th of July, 1918. It was a wonderfully festive day when the Hesper was allowed to slide down the inclined ways, but because the ship builders had underestimated her weight, she only slid down the ways by about 10 yards before everything collapsed. The Hesper came to a grinding halt, but fortunately didn’t roll over. It was not until that August before the ship was once again shored up, and launched into the Sheepscot River. Her master was Captain Caleb A. Haskell from Deer Isle, who then sailed her to Lisbon, Portugal. On her maiden voyage she carried a 2,000 ton cargo of coal. I got to know Bo’sun, or Boatswain, Vernon Haskell, who drove the bus that later picked me up in Bangor. He also came from Deer Isle and sailed on these very same ships when he was a young man. Back in those days seafaring was a family tradition, and the Haskells were well-known seafaring folks in these parts. These two sailing ships are now gone and with their loss, some more maritime history is lost forever.

In 1469, the regions of Aragon (Aragón) and Castile (Castilla) were united by the marriage of Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, thus creating España or Spain. The treasury of this fledgling nation had been depleted by the many battles they had waged against the Moors. The Spanish monarchs, seeing Portugal’s economic success, sought to establish their own trade routes to the Far East. Queen Isabella embraced this concept from the religious standpoint of going out into “all the world” and converting the pagan people of Asia to Christianity. At the same time, a tall, young, middle-class man, said to have come from Genoa, Italy, who held that his father was a fabric weaver and cheese merchant, sought to become a navigator. As such, Columbus sailed to Portugal where pirates allegedly attacked the ship he was on. Fortunately, he managed to swim ashore and joined his brother Bartholomew as a cartographer in Lisbon. Apparently to him, becoming a mapmaker must have seemed boring when there was a world to explore. Returning to the sea, he sailed to places as far away as Iceland to the north, and ventured south as far as Guinea on the West-African coast. It is reasonable to assume that he had heard or perhaps even read the stories about the Vikings that took place almost five hundred years prior to Columbus’ arriving there.

This laissez-faire policy changed after the union of Portugal and Spain in 1580. Inquisition proceedings were initiated throughout the consolidated empire, and over the next decades, hearings by Inquisitors from Lisbon regularly targeted the colony’s Judaizers. The fourth hearing in 1618, in which the ninety conversos were accused, coupled with the arrests

Several times Affonso sent his appeals for an end to the slave trade directly to the Pope in Rome, but the Portuguese detained his emissaries to the Vatican as they stepped off the boat in Lisbon. Affonso’s despair reached its depth in 1539, near the end of his life, when he heard that ten of his young nephews, grandsons, and other relatives who had been sent to Portugal for a religious education had disappeared en route. “We don’t know whether they are dead or alive,” he wrote in desperation, “nor how they might have died, nor what news we can give of them to their fathers and mothers.” We can imagine the king’s

In short, honesty is one of many factors that cannot be assumed to be equally present in all places or among all peoples. Nor does empirical evidence suggest an equality in this factor, any more than in many other factors. Among the simple tests used to assess the honesty in various peoples and places have been projects that deliberately left wallets containing both money and personal identification in public places in various cities around the world. When one such project in 2013 left a dozen wallets in public places, in various cities, the number of wallets returned with the money still in them varied from eleven out of twelve in Helsinki (Finland) to one out of twelve in Lisbon (Portugal). Moreover, the one wallet that was returned in Lisbon was returned by a couple visiting from the Netherlands; no Portuguese returned any.

But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Church and Spain led the Portuguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two thousand “converted” Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism, and purity of blood.* The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was installed only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not become grimly unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge, and—even more serious—those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought. That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor’s greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.12 (Compare the suspicious response to doctors in Inquisition Spain.)

Shreeom, the supreme God Vishnu, is currently regarded as the most exalted and supreme incarnation on earth. SriOm shares love with Mahalaxmi. He himself, Shreeom, is now considered the most sublime incarnation of God Vishnu. In the state of Nepal, in places like Butwal, Palpa, Triveni, Syangja, Prabat, Pokhara, Baglung, Damodarkund, Koshi Tatt, Kranali, Nagarkot, Kathmandu, Devghat. In india Rishikesh, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Rajasthan, Haridwar, Delhi, Varanasi, Badrinath, Kedarnath, and places outside Nepal like New York in America, Brunswick, Portland, Yetland, Boston, Lisbon in Portugal, Belgium, Norway, France, Germany, UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Netherlands, he displayed his miracles. In Triveni of Nepal, Shreeom, the sage of self-knowledge, gave the vision of his vast form to the saints at Koti Hom Ashram. Shreeom displayed countless faces of various Bhagawans within his body and encompassed the entire vast universe within himself. The sage of self-knowledge beheld the immensely vast body of Shreeom, witnessing the entire universe illuminated within it, the name of the Sant is Aatmagyani. Thus, Shreeom, with his four arms, held the conch, discus, mace and lotus.

what came to be known as the Carnation Revolution, the soldiers who swarmed into the streets of Lisbon, Portugal, placed flowers in their gun barrels to reassure the population of their peaceful intentions. And the officers who overthrew President Antonio Salazar on April 25, 1974, proved true to their word. Having ended close to half a century of repressive rule, they held elections the next year that brought to Portugal the democracy that it still enjoys today. But the impact went much further. After the Carnation Revolution, democracy bloomed in key Mediterranean countries held back by dictatorships from much of the social and economic progress of the rest of postwar Western Europe. Three months after the Lisbon uprising, the junta of colonels that was running Greece fell.

gastronomic flavours and traditions on display to tease and seduce the senses.

His best-known work is Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, first published in Goa in 1561. The treatise would turn him into a national hero in Portugal. This is ironical as Garcia was living quietly in this remote outpost because he wanted to stay away from the authorities in Lisbon! In

The Lima merchant's correspondent in Mexico City was Simon Vaez de Sevilla.16 Vaez de Sevilla had associates in Manila (who provided him with Asian commodities), Oaxaca (who provided him with cochineal), and Guatemala (who provided him with cacao and tobacco).17 All these goods were thus made available to the Lima merchant and were regularly sent down to Peru along the Pacific route or through Cartagena de Indias. Bautista Perez also depended on a number of suppliers-Diego Rodriguez de Lisboa, Enrique de Andrade, and Agustin Perez-in Lisbon and Seville to send him a range of European goods for sale in Lima and throughout Peru. Each of these suppliers had his own network of associates and correspondents on whom he, in turn, relied for provisioning. Given their location in what were two of the great European entrepots of the time, these Lisbon- and Seville-based merchants were often able to purchase on the spot the goods requested by Bautista Perez. They simply had to make the necessary arrangements with local brokers and merchants who specialized in bringing textiles and manufactured goods from the wider European economy (see Figure 4.1).18

Once, in Lisbon, I tried my best to work the phone book in a way that would assuage a longing [Alice and I] had for certain Chinese dishes . . . .

Despite these accommodations, anti-Semitism in Portugal led to a massacre of Jews in Lisbon in 1506.

The Portuguese explorers, astronauts of another time, used these winds and some educated guesswork to push European dominion out of the Mediterranean and into the world beyond. For the mahrineros of Lisbon, it was simple work on most days to sail south to places like Madeira and the Canary Islands, the first non-European stepping-stones of Iberian conquest. Getting home was harder, until someone took a gamble and found that if a sailor put his back to the land and sailed off far enough to the northwest, he might eventually make his way up into westerly winds and back to Portugal before the food ran out. Known to sailors as the volta do mar (return from the sea), this discovery—rather like the splitting of the atom five centuries later—would have irreversible consequences for all that came afterwards. Christopher Columbus used an expanded version of the volta to get his fleet from Spain to America and home again, but credit for a bolder leap goes to Bartolomeu Dias, who tested the concept on a global scale.

The next morning having we had the Continental Breakfast with French croissants and the usual strong Turkish coffee. Mia seemed strangely distant from me now sat next to Aleixo who had come to join us. I had a KLM flight to catch that afternoon and there was little left to say. Later Mia came with me to the row of taxies and told the driver in Portuguese to take me to the airport. As I got into the cab her last words to me were a mocking “Poor boy, poor, poor boy…” My place is here with Aleixo, but I was yours for a lovely day.

To maximize pleasure and to minimize pain - in that order - were characteristic Enlightenment concerns. This generally more receptive attitude toward good feeling and pleasure would have significant long-term consequences. It is a critical difference separating Enlightenment views on happiness from those of the ancients. There is another, however, of equal importance: that of ambition and scale. Although the philosophers of the principal classical schools sought valiantly to minimize the role of chance as a determinant of human happiness, they were never in a position to abolish it entirely. Neither, for that matter, were the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who, like men and women at all times, were forced to grapple with apparently random upheavals and terrible reversals of forture. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is an awful case in point. Striking on All Saints' Day while the majority of Lisbon's inhabitants were attending mass, the earthquake was followed by a tidal wave and terrible fires that destroyed much of the city and took the lives of tens of thousands of men and women. 'Quel triste jeu de hasard que le jeu de la vie humaine,' Voltaire was moved to reflect shortly thereafter: 'What a sad game of chance is this game of human life.' He was not alone in reexamining his more sanguine assumptions of earlier in the century, doubting the natural harmony of the universe and the possibilities of 'paradise on earth'; the catastrophe provoked widespread reflection on the apparent 'fatality of evil' and the random occurrence of senseless suffering. It was shortly thereafter that Voltaire produced his dark masterpiece, Candide, which mocks the pretension that this is the best of all possible worlds. And yet, in many ways, the incredulity expressed by educated Europeans in the earthquake's aftermath is a more interesting index of received assumptions, for it demonstrates the degree to which such random disasters were becoming, if not less common, at least less expected. Their power to shock was magnified accordingly, but only because the predictability and security of daily existence were increasing, along with the ability to control the consequences of unforeseen disaster. When the Enlightened Marquis of Pombal, the First Minister of Portugal, set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake, he paid great attention to modern principles of architecture and central planning to help ensure that if such a calamity were to strike again, the effects would be less severe. To this day, the rebuilt Lisbon of Pombal stands as an embodiment of Enlightened ideas. Thus, although eighteenth-century minds did not - and could not - succeed in mastering the random occurrences of the universe, they could - and did - conceive of exerting much greater control over nature and human affairs. Encouraged by the examples of Newtonian physics, they dreamed of understanding not only the laws of the physical universe but the moral and human laws as well, hoping one day to lay out with precision what the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico described as a 'new science' of society and man. It was in the eighteenth century, accordingly, that the human and social sciences were born, and so it is hardly surprising that observers turned their attention to studying happiness in similar terms. Whereas classical sages had aimed to cultivate a rarified ethical elite - attempting to bring happiness to a select circle of disciples, or at most to the active citizens of the polis - Enlightenment visionaries dreamed of bringing happiness to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole.

Under President Richard Nixon, U.S. policy developed an even more pronounced pro-Portuguese bent, consistent with the administration’s support for white-ruled Africa. The most notorious manifestation was the December 1971 executive agreement that gave Portugal $436 million in credits for the use of the Azores base until February 1974. It was, noted the New York Times, “one of the largest economic assistance packages negotiated in many years in exchange for foreign base rights,” and it would “prop up the Lisbon Government’s floundering economy,” exhausted by a decade of colonial wars.56 As Amílcar Cabral told the UN Security Council in Addis Ababa the following February, “Portugal would not be in a position to carry out three wars against Africans without the aid of her allies.”57 CUBAN

Lusitanian gentilezza. The beauty of Lisbon. Capanica, the cliff of rape. Charnica, fireworks and the popular circus. The palaces beside the Tagus. Linda Lolita. Schubert at the Palacio Queluz. The thieves' market. The restaurant on the beach. The waiter comes back a thousand times to ask if everything is alright, if the wine is cool enough, the fish well grilled, if everyone is happy. When he comes back for the thousand and first time, M. announces clearly, looking him right in the eye, 'Everything is perfect. We are really happy ! ' He is virtually paralysed totally taken aback. He disappears and never returns.

People still said that “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” even though the Commonwealth was starting to come apart. In spite of the obvious, it was unthinkable that the United States had a colony in Africa; well they had one, and that was where I was headed! World War II had been over for ten years and in Europe they were getting on with things and for now all was well in Africa, and with the World! Unless especially fitted out, aircraft didn’t have the range to cross the Atlantic in one jump, so after leaving Idlewild Airport in New York City, we flew halfway across the Atlantic Ocean to the Portuguese island of Santa Maria in the Azores. After refueling and stretching our legs we continued on to Lisbon. Our layovers were only for as long as it took to take care of business. There were no days built in, for me to have a leisurely, gentlemanly, civilized journey to my destination. Instead my seat was beginning to feel as hard as a rock pile. The engines continued to drone on as the Atlantic Ocean eventually gave way to the Iberian Peninsula. My view of Portugal was only what I could see from the air and what was at the airport. Again we landed for fuel in Lisbon, and then without skipping a beat, headed south across the Mediterranean to the North African desert. The beaches under us, in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara, were endless and the sand went from the barren coastal surf inland, to as far as the eye could see. With very few exceptions there was no evidence of civilization.