I've lived for 10 years in Switzerland, so I speak German.
quote by Martina Hingis

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I studied German at school. I lived in Berlin for two years and had a German girlfriend for five years, so I don't find speaking German particularly difficult. Singing was slightly more difficult.
quote by Martin Gore

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German is more familiar now since I live part of the year in Rome and part in the German part of Switzerland. But it's not difficult to sing in German; it's difficult to feel in German. This takes time. It's a culture.
quote by Cecilia Bartoli

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I always traveled. I left Cameroon when I was 11 years old. I lived in the USA, in Switzerland.
quote by Yannick Noah

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In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in everybody.
quote by Gertrude Stein

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In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.
quote by Gertrude Stein

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Russian Sonia
I, born in Weimar
Of a mother who was French
And German father, a most learned professor,
Orphaned at fourteen years,
Became a dancer, known as Russian Sonia,
All up and down the boulevards of Paris,
Mistress betimes of sundry dukes and counts,
And later of poor artists and of poets.
At forty years, passée, I sought New York
And met old Patrick Hummer on the boat,
Red-faced and hale, though turned his sixtieth year,
Returning after having sold a ship-load
Of cattle in the German city, Hamburg.
He brought me to Spoon River and we lived here
For twenty years -- they thought that we were married!
This oak tree near me is the favorite haunt
Of blue jays chattering, chattering all the day.
And why not? for my very dust is laughing
For thinking of the humorous thing called life.
poem by Edgar Lee Masters

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Imitated From The Japanese
A MOST astonishing thing --
Seventy years have I lived;
(Hurrah for the flowers of Spring,
For Spring is here again.)
Seventy years have I lived
No ragged beggar-man,
Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy.
poem by William Butler Yeats

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In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949)

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In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
quote by Graham Greene

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When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.
quote by Marcel Carne

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Speak little, speak truth. Spend little, pay cash.
Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.
quote by Herman Hesse

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We Speak Often
we speak often...
of revolution, yet
we almost never speak,
of the old woman left alone,
her husband dead two years...
who sits in the dark,
and sometimes eats,
and cant see to clean her house.
we speak of peace,
and send troops to liberate,
teaching seperation in our churches.
we speak of hope,
yet horde all we can,
and keep our revolvers loaded.
we speak of justice
in terms of 'i' and 'they'....
and applaud wordplay in our courtrooms...
we speak of equality,
then call each race by name,
and demand that they speak english.
we speak of god as holier than thou...
never understanding dialogue and dissolution....
we speak a lot, yet cannot listen...
what fools we are!
poem by Eric Cockrell

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When silent men speak they speak to the purpose.
When has there ever been a government in German history that came to the people and revealed its detailed plans for the coming years? That could not happen before, since German governments planned war and conquest.
quote by Walter Ulbricht

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Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
quote by Michel de Montaigne

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Speak With Kindness (Or Do Not Speak At All)
speak with kindness,
or do not speak at all.
speak not of judgement,
you are not the judge.
speak not of salvation,
let your living be your scriptures.
speak not of scriptures,
let your actions be your holy book.
speak not as apostle or teacher,
speak as a human being.
speak not of god,
then god will speak through you!
speak not as a man,
for you are woman too.
speak not with hateful malice,
for love does not work that way.
speak not as a prophet or seer,
speak as compassion made flesh.
speak not of morality,
speak of connection.
speak not of authority,
the tree and the leaf have just as much.
speak not of holiness,
for all that lives be holy.
speak with kindness...
or do not speak at all!
poem by Eric Cockrell

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Years 1
For years I let the torment go on
Years I let you get in my head
Years I had to cry myself to sleep
your out now and last night
what you did to me replayed in my head again
I told myself i wasn't going to let it happen but it did
For years I have lived in scared quarters
For years I have looked for your face
For years I have never felt safe
For years I have remembered
poem by Marissa Ford

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I Walked Last Night In A District I Lived In For Almost Twenty Years
I WALKED LAST NIGHT IN A DISTRICT I LIVED IN FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS
I walked last night in a district I lived in for almost twenty years
I came back after being away for a time
To visit an old and ailing friend
The streets were empty and lonely as they often were then-
I thought for the first time I understood how lonely the district itself is-
‘A lonely district’
I wondered how I managed to live there all those years
And how anyone still manages to live there-
I looked up at the sky and wrote in my mind a small poem of a kind I wrote many of in my years there
I remembered teachers and friends who had lived there
No longer of this district or any district on earth
I wondered how life goes and how from so many years so much life has been lived without having any place in my memory
I felt as empty inside as the district without
I did not have to wait long for the bus
And relieved inside it I put my heart to home
So many years had been lived there
I remembered taking my small children to the playground there
Now they thank G-d have children of their own
Oh the years go by and the life we have lived in them largely dies
Forever to be unknown again-
I put my heart and mind in a different direction
And began to do what I always do – not think of the district again
Life is this mystery and question we live through and never wholly possess even as we are experiencing it
How long before all will be gone for me
Including the district I live in now?
poem by Shalom Freedman

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Although I had resigned my commission as an officer two years before, I immediately left Switzerland, accompanied by my wife, in order to report for duty. As it happened, a wire reached me a day later calling me to the colors.
quote by Fritz Kreisler

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