Karl Kraus Quotes

It is uplifting to lose one?s faith in a reality which looks the way it is described in a newspaper.

I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.

You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.

My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.

The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.

Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.

Many talents preserve their precociousness right into old age.

The little stations are very proud because the expresses have to pass them by.

There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.

The art of an actress is sublimated sexuality. But off the stage the fire must be able to reconvert the steam into body.

The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.

The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.

To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.

Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.

It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.

The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors.

Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

Many share my views with me. But I don't share them with them.

One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.

Morality is the tendency to pour out the baby with the bathwater.

I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.

To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.

How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another.

Medicine: "Your money and your life!

Family life is an encroachment on private life.

I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.

The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love.

I am not for women but against men.

Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.

Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.

The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.

To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism.

Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.

On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.

Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.

A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.

Sexual enlightenment is that hardhearted process which for hygienic reasons forbids young people to satisfy their curiosity themselves.

My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

I would have stage-fright if I had to speak with every one of the people before whom I speak.

Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.

It so often happened to me that someone who shared my opinion kept the larger share for himself that I am now forewarned and offer people only ideas.

Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.

Through my satire I make little people so big that afterwards they are worthy objects of my satire and no one can reproach me any longer.

An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.

If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me.

A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time

Nothing is more horrible than my self in the mirror of hysteria. Nothing is more vulgar than my style in the hands of another. Toimitate me is to punish me.

Humanity is the washerwoman of society that wrings out its dirty laundry in tears.

What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?