Karl Kraus Quotes

#1. Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.

Karl Kraus

#2. Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.

Karl Kraus

#3. 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.

Karl Kraus

#4. The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

Karl Kraus

#5. The real truths are those that can be invented.

Karl Kraus

#6. When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.'

Karl Kraus

#7. Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#10. The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content, or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result.

Karl Kraus

#11. If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator.

Karl Kraus

#12. Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#14. I am not for women but against men.

Karl Kraus

#15. Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

Karl Kraus

#16. A healthy man is content with a woman. An erotic man is content with a stocking to get to a woman. A sick man is content with thestocking.

Karl Kraus

#17. There is no more unhappy being under the sun than a fetishist who pines for a boot and has to content himself with an entire woman.

Karl Kraus

#18. Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#20. The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#23. A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#25. If something is stolen from you, don't go to the police. They're not interested. Don't go to a psychologist either, because he's interested in only one thing: that it was really you who did the stealing.

Karl Kraus

#26. 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.

Karl Kraus

#27. Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.

Karl Kraus

#28. 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.

Karl Kraus

#29. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#31. Medicine: Your money and your life!

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#35. Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#37. A cigar," said the altruist, "a cigar, my good man, I cannot give you. But any time you need a light, just come around; mine is always lit.

Karl Kraus

#38. Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

Karl Kraus

#39. How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#42. 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.

Karl Kraus

#43. Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#45. Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it ismainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code.

Karl Kraus

#46. 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.

Karl Kraus

#47. I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.

Karl Kraus

#48. In the theater one must sit in such a way that one sees the audience as a dark mass. Then it cannot bother one more than it does an actor. Nothing is more disturbing than being able to distinguish individuals in the crowd.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#50. 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.

Karl Kraus

#51. The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

Karl Kraus

#52. The triumph of morality: A thief who has broken into a bedroom claims his sense of shame had been outraged, and by threatening theoccupants with exposure of an immoral act he blackmails them into not bringing charges for burglary.

Karl Kraus

#53. My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.

Karl Kraus

#54. War: first, one hopes to win;
then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

Karl Kraus

#55. The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#58. Soldiers who don't know what they're fighting for know, nevertheless, what they're not fighting for.

Karl Kraus

#59. 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.

Karl Kraus

#60. A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#65. Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#67. He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.

Karl Kraus

#68. Science is spectrum analysis. Art is Photosynthesis.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#70. 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.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#72. Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.

Karl Kraus

#73. I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.

Karl Kraus

#74. Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

Karl Kraus

#75. I like to hold a monologue with women. But a dialogue with myself is more stimulating.

Karl Kraus

#76. Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Karl Kraus

#77. 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.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#79. Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

Karl Kraus

#80. Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#82. I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.

Karl Kraus

#83. Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#87. So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes
with the exception of their occupation.

Karl Kraus

#88. Talent is often a defect in character.

Karl Kraus

#89. Ideas are transplanted by splitting, thoughts by sprouting.

Karl Kraus

#90. The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.

Karl Kraus

#91. Hate must make a person productive; otherwise one might as well love.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#93. Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.

Karl Kraus

#94. The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#96. To be perfect, one lacks only a defect.

Karl Kraus

#97. Everything that's created remains as it was before it was created. The artist fetches it down from the heavens as a finished thing. Eternity has no beginning. Poetry or a Joke: the act of creation lies between what's self-evident and what is permanent

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#99. Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.

Karl Kraus

#100. Anesthesia: wounds without pain. Neurasthenia: pain without wounds.

Karl Kraus