Hungarians about Hungarians

It is not enough to be Hungarian; you must have talent as well.
- Alexander Korda

Those who were thinking logically in Hungary, always despaired.
- Antal Szerb

Logic is not what our history teaches us.
- Gyula Illyés

More…

Hungarian state of mind: rapturous blues-nursing, jazzed up with rhapsodic manic-depression.
- Zsuzsanna Ardó

The legendary Hungarian IQ is efficiently repressed by their lamentable EQ.
- Zsuzsanna Ardó

If we look at the aura created for a foreigner today by the word ‘Hungarian’, independent of a Hungarian in the particular Hungary as a political entity, the first thing we have to say is that everything decorated with the adjective ‘Hungarian’ belongs almost without exception to the field of the exotic, ans in particular, to the type we could call the ‘European exotic’…
- István Bibó

Hmm… could it be then that it is not the authentic, but the simulated Hungarian which is the epitome of exotic glamour?
- Zsuzsanna Ardó

If I am alone in a room, I am a person. If a woman enters, I become a man. And the more of a woman is the woman who enters, the more of a man I become.
- Frigyes Karinthy

Asserting their masculinity is the absolute minimum expected of Hungarian men.
- Zsuzsanna Ardó

Desire is fuelled by all, but fulfillment.
- Erno Osvát

When your soul is seized by madness… then you are in love!
- József Eötvös

I was a most virile lad of the time and made no bones about the fact that I was a veritable man in my love making. Let her whom I chose for myself also go mad and scream with joy, for her boast of it afterwards.
- Endre Ady

Make no mistake, Hungarian romance, as most other things Hungarian, conforms to and, as usual, self-consciously outdoes other European traditions.
- Zsuzsanna Ardó

When she hates me, I love her,
when she loves me, I hate her.
No other alternative.
- Péter Esterházy

What utter baloney. Has no one ever noticed that reading love stories of European literature should in fact turn us off being in love?
- Péter Nádas

As Europeans of old, Hungarians are in a catharsis in a big way and in a dignified fashion, too.
- Zsuzsanna Ardó

Wanting everything instantaneously. As if life, her life, was a film in the fast motion.
- Péter Esterházy

I like the house, when it is teeming with life, when faces change, and every moment is different from the one that comes before. Monotony would kill me.
- István Örkény

Others are altogether different from us… and it is through but pain and pain again that we can come to learn this.
- Ferenc Molnár

From Love Blues, Hungarian Rhapsodies by Zsuzsanna Ardó