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April 28, 2024
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Is a weekend in Amsterdam on your bucket list? You are not the only one! The world-famous capital of The Netherlands has something for everyone. From 17th-century-old buildings and mesmerizing canals to the coffee shop culture and Amsterdam beaches, the city surely knows how to attract people from all over the world. Aside from that, they are also putting in great efforts to make the city as sustainable as possible. The city is dotted with green spaces and is often referred to as “the city of bikes” making it a joy to discover its districts in an eco-friendly way. Amsterdammers are proud of their city and many of the quotes in this article are from people who actually live in Amsterdam and love to celebrate their city.
The canals of Amsterdam
While the Red Light District, Anne Frank’s house, and a coffee shop are probably on your wishlist when you can only spend 24 hours in Amsterdam, there are plenty more things to discover in the city that are more of the beaten path and reflect the true local spirit of Amsterdam.
The best way and fastest way to do this as a conscious traveler is to book a tour with the guys of Free alternative tour Amsterdam! On this tour, you’ll learn how cycling became a part of the Dutch DNA, where to find the best Street Art, and which corners of the city are the coziest for a coffee or a cocktail.
Many Amsterdammers will tell you that you won’t find the soul of Amsterdam in a coffee shop so ask around and listen to the tips of people who know the city best. Also, there are a bunch of great souvenirs that you can buy in Amsterdam that go beyond cheese and clogs!
And suppose you want to do something extraordinary. In that case, there are many crazy things to do in Amsterdam too like visiting a museum completely dedicated to cats or taking a ride on Europe’s highest swing.
But…Anyway! This post is supposed to be about Amsterdam quotes! So let’s get on with that!
Muntplein, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
I have collected a whole bunch of quotes about Amsterdam for you! My personal favorites are in the “Amsterdam quotes about travel”-section but you can find plenty more great quotes in the other sections too. The post ends with some Amsterdam captions you can use for Instagram and I couldn’t hold myself back from also posting a few funny puns so you will end reading this article with a smile on your face. Enjoy!
Amsterdam Canals, The Netherlands.
“When you mention you’ll be making a stopover in Amsterdam, you get a reaction I can only describe as semi-collegiate. A knowing look … as if there can really only be 2 reasons you’d go to this lovely little city of canals.”
“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth, it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”
“Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town.”
“I think Amsterdam is to Holland what New York is to America in a sense. It’s a metropolis, so it’s representative of Holland, but only a part of it – you know, it’s more extreme, there’s more happening, it’s more liberal and more daring than the countryside in Holland is.”
"Amsterdam is known as a trouble-some city and the Amsterdammers are troublesome people but perhaps that's why the heart of the Netherlands is beating most strongly in Amsterdam."
Amsterdam is famous as the city where everyone cycles, from young to old, from rich to poor, and from hipster to average joe. That might be a slight exaggeration on the current situation but a great goal for the bicycle city of the future.
“The Dutch life is beautifully attuned to the deliberate pace of bicycle riding. It has the same calm and slow rhythm which allows the Hollander time off for coffee in the middle of the morning, for tea in the afternoon, and tea again in the evening. . . . To a Dutchman a bicycle becomes a matter of individual expression, almost a part of the body, controlled subconsciously and leaving him free to meditation.
"I'm scared of audiences. One show in Amsterdam I was so nervous, I escaped out the fire exit. I've thrown up a couple of times. Once in Brussels, I projectile vomited on someone. I just gotta bear it. But I don't like touring. I have anxiety attacks a lot."
“Amsterdam lives and breathes creativity. One moment you walk into a building from the 17th century and the next you find yourself in a hub of creative start-up companies.”
Eye filmmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
“If you can’t go to Indonesia for its food, go to Amsterdam.”
“I didn’t know you even could get arrested in Amsterdam.”
“In Europe, I always have fun bike riding in Amsterdam.”
“In Amsterdam, the water is the mistress and the land the vassal.”
"The famous Red Light District, where you can fuck an Eastern European prostitute in the pooper at competitive prices."
“In Amsterdam, the river and canals have been central to city life for the last four centuries.”
"The curious Dutch classification "gedogen", which means ‘technically illegal but officially tolerated."
Cycling nowadays is tantamount to attempting suicide.”
Streets of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
"Amsterdam’s my favourite place to visit."
“In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there.
"I love Amsterdam. The city is vibrant and alive. It’s fresh and so open. It’s definitely one of my favorite places."
“Without someone to talk to, every sight I saw—whether it was the Trevi Fountain or a canal in Amsterdam—felt simply like a name on a list that I needed to check off.”
“You could spend your time with your nose buried in a guidebook, but Amsterdam really is best explored on foot, so you can stumble upon the city’s hidden gems. The architecture and the beauty of some of the buildings is also wonderful.”
“In Amsterdam, the bike…crappy old bikes actually…are the kings of the road. Even cars fear them. You better look both ways.”
"Amsterdam has more than 150 canals and 1,250 bridges, but it never seems crowded, nor bent and bitter from fleecing the tourist."
“I dropped my pants in a tattoo parlour in Amsterdam. I woke up in a waterbed with this funky-looking dragon with a blue tongue on my hip. I realized I made a mistake, so a few months later I got a cross to cover it. When my pants hang low, it looks like I’m wearing a dagger!”
“The historical center of Amsterdam. Home to the royal palace, tourists and…very strange people.”
“Amsterdam is a breeding ground for new creative pursuits in many areas fuelled by a tolerance and openness to ideas unlike any other city I’ve been to. There is something for everyone here, especially when you dare to go off the beaten path.”
“The thing that first knocked me out about Amsterdam, even on the coldest, greyest February day, was its beauty. The houses rise, red and grey, and seem to float swanlike above the canals. The sheen on the water is olive-green, and mallards with their brilliant emerald heads slide gravely under the bridges. if you close your eyes you can see the city peopled again by those who built it - seventeenth century burghers in their black coats, rich from trading with the Indies.”
“I can be a bit nerdy so I need a good, clearly marked map, as you can miss out on some of the coolest places in Amsterdam if you don’t have a wander down the little side streets.”
“San Francisco is a lot like Amsterdam – free, open-minded and casual – though I expected better weather.”
“Amsterdam: city of tolerance…though, chances are your louder drinkers are from elsewhere and not all Amsterdammers, by any means, are smoking indo. Many, if not most, of the people taking a plastic, fantastic joyride to the center of your mind on the barstools of coffee shops are tourists. It’s a legal novelty, and one way to kick back on a layover… not that I would ever, ever do such a thing.”
"Most visitors to Amsterdam will wander into the red-light district out of sheer curiosity. The narrow streets are mostly safe day and night – just don’t try to take pictures of the women working in the windows."
“My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.”
“Amsterdam. It is so cute and quaint. I rode bicycles around the city and through the tiny little streets, rented a paddleboat and had a picnic lunch on the canals.”
“I had been to Amsterdam a couple of times with Eric; we loved the museums and the Concertgebouw (it was here that I first heard Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, in Dutch). We loved the canals lined with tall, stepped houses; the old Hortus Botanicus and the beautiful seventeenth-century Portuguese synagogue; the Rembrandtplein with its open-air cafés; the fresh herrings sold in the streets and eaten on the spot; and the general atmosphere of cordiality and openness which seemed peculiar to the city.”
Anne Frank, Madame Tussauds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
I really wanted to include a few quotes on Amsterdam about World War II in this post. Many people visit the Anne Frank Museum while they are in Amsterdam. It’s important to learn about these things and remember these events so history won’t repeat itself.
There are also some great tours in Amsterdam covering the story of Anne Frank and some World War II events.
"None inspires and challenges me more than the verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam, even after many visits, so I encourage anyone with a real interest in this subject to go there first. "
“But I looked out of the open window too, over a large area of Amsterdam, over all the roofs and on to the horizon, which was such a pale blue that it was hard to see the dividing line. "As long as this exists," I thought, "and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy.”
“I have always lived in Amsterdam. During the war, we inhabited the Rivieren neighbourhood where many Jews lived at the time. Our downstairs neighbours were Jews, and there were also Jews a few houses from us. We saw how they were rounded up and taken away. That made a very great impression on me.”
"In de mid-1960's, Amsterdam became a typical youth city. The post-war generation wanted to live on their own, in the heart of the city. Woman's emancipation and the contraceptive pill allowed them to delay starting a family and thus a group of older youth developed, for whom the open spaces of the city became a second home."
“The Annex is an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland.”
Thre are lots of birds, especially pigeons, in Amsterdam.
“And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.”
“the smell of canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before this recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. That is probably true even if you live to be ninety.”
“It was Begbie who ensured he could never return. He had done what he wanted to do. He could now never go back to Leith, to Edinburgh, even to Scotland, ever again. There, he could not be anything other than he was. Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what he wanted to be. He'd stand or fall alone. This thought both terrified and excited him as he contemplated life in Amsterdam.”
“What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn't matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam."
“I’d asked the same question a few years earlier in Amsterdam and learned that in the Netherlands you’re more apt to bring a disease into it. “Like if someone drives in a crazy way, it’s normal to call them a cholera sufferer,” a Dutch woman told me. “Either that or a cancer whore.”
“Early the next morning, they were on a tram out to the far edge of Amsterdam. Ginny liked the tram. It was like an overgrown toy train that had gotten loose on the streets. She looked out and saw the Netherlands wobbling by - its ancient houses and constant canals and people in practical shoes.”
“Look, it is snowing! Oh, I must go out! Amsterdam asleep in the white night, the dark jade canals under the little snow-covered bridges, the empty streets, my muted steps--there will be purity, even if fleeting, before tomorrows mud.
“I’ve been in Amsterdam, I’ve been able to enjoy many aspects of cycling here. One thing I have not been able to do yet is bike with my sweetheart. But now that you’re here, I’m so excited to ride around town with you among all the thousands of other cyclists while I hold your wrist or you hold mine.”
“Then, with an extended, falling glissando of disgust, the whole string section, plus flutes and piccolo, surged toward the brass, leaving the music critic and his deed - an early evening frites and mayonnaise on Oude Hoogstraat - illuminated under a lonely chandelier.”
Amsterdam quotes: a beautiful sunrise over the canals.
"I lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam for a year. It was intense, and it’s possible that I even had a few blackouts."
"Amsterdam is in many ways the last great champion of food from a wall: automat style dining."
"It’s hard to argue over money when a girl flashes you her pussy."
“I was told David Letterman and Kaufman had heart attacks on the same day. David Letterman’s heart attack was at a hospital in NYC. Kaufman’s heart attack was at the red light district in Amsterdam. I think Kaufman had more fun.”
"Last time I was here I slept in a park because I spent all my money on hash and hookers."
“Call me a pig, but isn’t it brilliantly refreshing how early the Dutch eat dinner? When they’re still laying out the cutlery in achingly hip Barcelona, they’re hanging the closed sign on the restaurant doors of old Amsterdam.”
"My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them."
“They go to Amsterdam to see a famous writer, but they really go to Amsterdam to have sex.”
(On Dutch brown cafes or neighborhood pubs) "After being somewhat concerned that this was some sort of underground thing for German fetishists, I was informed that they're actually bars."
Bourbon Street, an excellent live music venue in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam has a lively music scene! Be sure to check out Bourbon Street to discover some great Dutch bands and foreign bands playing jazz, blues, should and folk music.
"I'm sorry, mother... I'm sorry, I let you down, well, these days I'm fine, no these days I tend to lie, I'll take the Western train, just by the side of Amsterdam, just by my left brain, just by the side of the Tin Man."
"all inside our Amsterdam she hides, watery-eyed, that howling wind, she’s waving hi, her other hand’s in mine. oh silhouette, she’s growing tall and fine, she’s got my back, she’ll follow me down every street, no matter what my crime."
"In the ports of Amsterdam, there's a sailor who drinks, and he drinks and he drinks, and he drinks once again. He'll drink to the health, of the whores of Amsterdam, who have given their bodies, to a thousand other men."
Windmills in Amsterdam.
“I am a village boy, and Amsterdam for me was always the big town.”
"Many visitors come to Amsterdam with a list of things to do while here: get high, motorboat a hooker, that sort of thing."
“Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the centre.”
“Location: Amsterdam, Where Fire Is Called “Vlam”."
More Amsterdam canals!
“I love Amsterdam. The city is vibrant and alive. It’s fresh and so open. It’s definitely one of my favourite places.”
“Stand outside De Eland on the Berenstraat Bridge over the Prinsengracht and you see what real Amsterdam life is like.”
Here people cycled with a reckless swagger, talking on the phone and eating breakfast.
“And things are about to get pretty crazy in this alleyway. Even for Amsterdam.”
“Amsterdam: Where the pendulum swings from God to a guilder.”
→ Also read: Is it safe to drink tap water in Amsterdam?
“Hands up if you’ve fallen in love with Amsterdam!”
“Amsterdam – the city of bikes”
“Do it for the Amstergram!”
“AmsterDAMN!”
‘I left my heart in Amsterdam.’
Amsterdam - My favorite city to pedal around in.
"Amsterdam, a city of sin and canals."
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
"A'dam good view!"
"Amstel in love with Amsterdam."
“Dam Good Vibes!"
"Amsterdam is a gouda city!"
"I'm having A'dam good time!"
"I don't give a Dam about the rain!"
"People are real cycle-paths in Amsterdam!"
"Amsterspamming you with pictures of my trip!"
"Nethermind, I'll have another Amstel."
"Dam, where can we find some stroopwafels on the go?"
Amsterdam canal quotes
There you go! I hope you enjoyed this post with quotes about Amsterdam. What do you think is the best quote on Amsterdam? Let me know in the comments below! And if know any other amazing Amsterdam quotes or Instagram captions for Amsterdam let me know that too!
In addition, I also love fabulous Amsterdam sayings or if you have invented a remarkable Amsterdam phrase yourself while you were visiting the city, please drop a line below! I would love to hear from you!
If you are traveling to the Netherlands, it’s also worth it to pay a visit to Rotterdam! It’s smaller in size but nevertheless a charming and safe city to explore full of great museums, vintage stores, vegan restaurants, and hotspots for conscious travelers.
ENJOY!
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Hi! I am Annelies and this is Travelers & Dreamers, a blog about conscious travel which means traveling in a more mindful way, with a positive impact on the world and yourself!
On this website, I cover different topics like slow travel, plant-based food guides, responsible travel, sustainable packing, eco-travel, and more!
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Candy
As an Amsterdam resident, I love the perspective these quotes offer on our city. The weather here is often a point of debate, but it truly contributes to the unique character of Amsterdam – be it the misty mornings enhancing the beauty of our canals, or the sunny afternoons perfect for cycling around town.