Karl Kraus Quotes

There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

Cosmetics is the science of a woman's cosmos.

The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember.

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.

If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.

One must read all writers twice--the good as well as the bad. The one kind will be recognized; the other, unmasked.

Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.

The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.

Ask your neighbor only about things you know better yourself. Then his advice could prove valuable.

Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.

A snob is unreliable. The work he praises might just be good.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

One cleans someone else's threshold of consciousness only if one's own home is dirty.

Talent is often a defect in character.

Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience--this is what you get if you haven't sinned.

The real truths are those that can be invented.

The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.

News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.

What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.

There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.

Most people only do what they are asked to do; success comes to those who do a little more.

There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.

Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.

You don't even live once.

Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.

Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.

The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.

Many women would like to dream with men without sleeping with them. Someone should point out to them that this is utterly impossible.

Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

Sound opinions are valueless. What matters is who holds them.

A bibliophile has approximately the same relationship to literature as a philatelist to geography.

Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.

Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.

They judge lest they be judged.

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

Religion, morality, and patriotism are feelings that are manifested only when they are outraged.

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.

Lord, forgive them, for they know what they do!

Art is something that is so perfectly clear that no one comprehends it.

I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.

We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.

One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.

Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.

Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?

Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music.