Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 2

A healthy society begins with healthy individuals.
Sabina Nore
The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.
Adolf Hitler
Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.
Rainer Maria Rilke
All things want to float.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
Viktor E. Frankl
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks the ultimate the last test and proof the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Economic history shows us a continual increase in the demand for money. The characteristic feature of the development of the demand for money is its intensification; the growth of division of labour and consequently of exchange transactions, which have constantly become more and more indirect and dependent on the use of money, have helped to bring this about, as well as the increase of population and prosperity.
Ludwig von Mises
Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Nothing in this world can one imagine beforehand not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Love is a drama of contradictions.
Franz Kafka
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.
Sigmund Freud
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor E. Frankl
In the depths of the ocean; Dipped in love without expectations, We have stripped off our masks.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into the history and statistics of prices; for the extension of the theory of the nature and value of money they are unfortunately not very important.
Ludwig von Mises
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.
Ludwig von Mises
We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have let ourselves go and we have gone away and we have gone under, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left behind nothing and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents did not inform us of or enlighten us about the fact that our life-process is in reality nothing but a process of illness. We were up above, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal and we are down below, without our parents, again locked up in these walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal.
Thomas Bernhard
Let This Darkness Be a Bell TowerQuiet friend who has come so far,feel how your breathing makes more space around you.Let this darkness be a bell towerand you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.Move back and forth into the change.What is it like, such intensity of pain?If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,say to the silent earth: I flow.To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it - and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness; the suffering is what we add to it.
Adalbert Stifter
Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling.
Milena Michiko Flašar
The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.
Bruno Bettelheim
The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck. He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately ....
Gerald Holton
The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.
Konrad Lorenz
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations.
Sigmund Freud
While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.
Friedrich A. Hayek
The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.
Sigmund Freud
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Eugene T. Gendlin
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
Peter F Drucker
Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the string, collecting itselfto be more than itself as it shoots?
Rainer Maria Rilke
When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in, in every state that we imagine ourselves in.
Thomas Bernhard
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Viktor E. Frankl
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl R. Popper
Common man does not speculate about the great problems. With regard to them he relies upon other people's authority, he behaves as "every decent fellow must behave,'' he is like a sheep in the herd. It is precisely this intellectual inertia that characterizes a man as a common man. Yet the common man does choose. He chooses to adopt traditional patterns or patterns adopted by other people because he is convinced that this procedure is best fitted to achieve his own welfare. And he is ready to change his ideology and consequently his mode of action whenever he becomes convinced that this would better serve his own interests.
Ludwig von Mises
A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
Sigmund Freud
Wisom is inseparable from knowledge; it is knowledge plus a quality which is within the human being. Without it, knowledge is dry, almost unfit for human consumption, and dangerous to application.
Isidor Rabi
Silence is the highest form of meditation.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.
Otto Weininger
sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless manthe most guilty.
Franz Kafka
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
Franz Kafka
Success which is something so simple in the end is made up of thousands of things we never fully know what.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learningand education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.
Ivan Illich
A game lasts 90 minutes. And how long are 90 minutes? How long are they without society? And who bares them?
Ilse Aichinger
If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.
Adolf Hitler
An honorable man has a heart for the poor and vulnerable in our society.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German.
Emperor Charles V
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
Franz Kafka
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
Karl Kraus
That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
That policy which aims at raising the objective exchange-value of money is called, after the most important means at its disposal, restrictionism or deflationism. This nomenclature does not really embrace all the policies that aim at an increase in the value of money. The aim of restrictionism may also be attained by not increasing the quantity of money when the demand for it increases, or by not increasing it enough. This method has quite often been adopted as a way of increasing the value of money in face of the problems of a depreciated credit-money standard.
Ludwig von Mises
The true hero trains himself in silence.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.
Wilhelm Reich
As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic literature are, with a few exceptions, not out to convert, but to set down a narrative story endowed with the consistency and conviction of inner reality only during the time of the reading: a game, sometimes a highly serious game, with anxiety and fright, horror and terror.
Franz Rottensteiner
There are people who think that Malina and I are married. We never considered that we might be married, that such a possibility could exist, nor even the idea that other people might think that we were married. For the longest time it never crossed our minds that, like other people, we appear as man and wife wherever we go. This was a complete surprise for us, but we had no idea what to make of it. We laughed a lot.
Ingeborg Bachmann
Many young people are still driven to art, as in olden times. Most of them are driven by their parents, who know nothing about art—only that it exists.
Elfriede Jelinek
And the child—your child—was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.
Stefan Zweig
Granted, many of them replied, that socialism may not result in riches for all but rather in a smaller production of wealth; nevertheless the masses will be happier under socialism, because they will share their worries with all their fellow citizens, and there will not be wealthier classes to be envied by poorer ones. The starving and ragged workers of Soviet Russia, they tell us, are a thousand times more joyful than the workers of the West who live under conditions which are luxurious compared to Russian standards; equality in poverty is a more satisfactory state than well-being where there are people who can flaunt more luxuries than the average man.
Ludwig von Mises