Karl Kraus Quotes

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

In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.

In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

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

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

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

It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.

I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.

Penalties serve to deter those who are not inclined to commit any crimes.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.

Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.

Immortality is the only thing which doesn't tolerate being postponed.

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

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.

A poem is good until one knows by whom it is.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

Nowadays the thief cannot be distinguished from his victim. Neither has any valuable objects on him.

Medicine: Your money and your life!

The real truths are those that can be invented.

A weak man has doubts before a decision; a strong man has them afterwards.

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

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

The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.

Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.

Many talents preserve their precociousness right into old age.

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

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

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

When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.

Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.

Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.

Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.

Science is spectrum analysis. Art is Photosynthesis.

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

Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.

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

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.

Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden

He who sleeps half a day has won half a life.

Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.

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

I trim my opponents to fit my arrows.

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

There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman's shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.

Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.

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

Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.

It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

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 illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time

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

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

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

I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.

You don't even live once.

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

Family life is an encroachment on private life.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

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

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.

My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.

Satire that the censor understands is rightly censored.

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

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.

One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

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

I am not for women but against men.

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

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

Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.

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

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.

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

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

Ingratitude is often disproportionate to the benefaction received.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.