Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 3

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.
Alfred Adler
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
Anna Freud
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
Sigmund Freud
The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became extinct before man set eyes on them.
Sigmund Freud
The best way to find inner peace is the practice in forbearance.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.
Friedrich A. Hayek
My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.
Michael Haneke
In our civilization men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.
Theodor Reik
My favorite, how did you put it now? Landscapes, animals, plants? Favorite what? Books, music, architecture, painting? I don't have any favorite animals, no favorite mosquitoes, favorite beetles, favorite worms, even with the best will in the world I cannot tell you which birds or fish or predators I prefer, it would also be difficult for me to have to choose much more generally.
Ingeborg Bachmann
A gently touching hand is an expression of trust.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
Ludwig von Mises
Life is often a Labyrinth of Passions without exit.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
Robert Musil
Bambi was inspired, and said trembling, "There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him.
Felix Salten
In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it.
Ruth Klüger
No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.
Elfriede Jelinek
There are no shortcuts—everything is reps, reps, reps.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature - and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine - fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely,it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defence makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support,the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine.
Adolf Hitler
Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.
Karl R. Popper
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka
People who walk across dark bridges, past saints,with dim, small lights.Clouds which move across gray skiespast churcheswith towers darkened in the dusk.One who leans against granite railinggazing into the evening waters,His hands resting on old stones.
Franz Kafka
And at night, when it breathes delicately from silence - I love listening to your voice. It is like a heavenly graceful singing of thousands of stars.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
As regards the social apparatus of repression and coercion, the government, there cannot be any question of freedom. Government is essentially the negation of liberty. It is the recourse to violence or threat of violence in order to make all people obey the orders of the government, whether they like it or not. As far as the government’s jurisdiction extends, there is coercion, not freedom. Government is a necessary institution, the means to make the social system of cooperation work smoothly without being disturbed by violent acts on the part of gangsters whether of domestic or of foreign origin. Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful human coexistence possible. But it is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging. Whatever a government does it is ultimately supported by the actions of armed constables.
Ludwig von Mises
Love is to feel your breath.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.
Friedrich A. Hayek
And then came a damp, cold night in Flanders, through which we marched in silence, and when the day began to emerge from the mists, suddenly an iron greeting came whizzing at us over our heads, and with a sharp report sent the little pellets flying between our ranks, ripping up the wet ground; but even before the little cloud had passed, from two hundred throats the first hurrah rose to meet the first messenger of death. Then a crackling and a roaring, a singing and a howling began, and with feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward, faster and faster, until suddenly past turnip fields and hedges the fight began, the fight of man against man. And from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears, coming closer and closer, leaping from company to company, and just as Death plunged a busy hand into our ranks, the song reached us too and we passed it along: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, über Alles in der Welt!
Adolf Hitler
We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colours in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colours.
E.H. Gombrich
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Sigmund Freud
Hans Selye, the pioneer in the understanding of human stress, was often asked the following question: "What is the most stressful condition a person can face?" His unexpected response: "Not having something to BELIEVE in.
Hans Selye
A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.
Sigmund Freud
If love disappear forever, a veil of sadness, falls over the valley of dried tears.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The spark of consciousness is reflected in the river, where a dance of infinite faces lined in profane lights.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
A man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative.
Viktor E. Frankl
Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.
Gerda Lerner
By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were....Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.
Erwin Schrödinger
Many of the best fantastic stories begin in a leisurely way, set in commonplace surroundings, with exact, meticulous descriptions of an ordinary background, much as in a 'realistic' tale. Then a gradual - or it may be sometimes a shockingly abrupt - change becomes apparent, and the reader begins to realize that what is being described is alien to the world he is accustomed to, that something strange has crept or leapt into it. This strangeness changes the world permanently and fundamentally.
Franz Rottensteiner
The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ---And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls.
Rainer Maria Rilke
What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.
Franz Kafka
Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.
Viktor E. Frankl
Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
On increasingly warm nice days I liked to sit toward noon on the bench encircling the cherry tree and look at the bare trees, the freshly plowed fields, the green strips of winter planting, the meadows that were already sprouting, and through the fragrance which swells out of the ground with the advent of spring contemplate the mountains, gleaming with the colossal quantities of snow still on them.
Adalbert Stifter
As a rule, however, an increase in the value of money spreads only gradually. The first of those who have to content themselves with lower prices than before for the commodities they sell, while they still have to pay the old higher prices for the commodities they buy, are those who are injured by the increase in the value of money. Those, however, who are the last to have to reduce the prices of the commodities they sell, and have meanwhile been able to take advantage of the fall in the prices of other things, are those who profit by the change.
Ludwig von Mises
She was at that crucial age when a women begins to regret having stayed faithful to a husband she never really loved, when the glowing sunset colors of her beauty offer her one last, urgent choice between maternal and feminine love. At such a moment a life that seemed to have chosen its course long ago is questioned once again, for the last time the magic compass needle of the will hovers between final resignation and the hope of erotic experience.
Stefan Zweig
Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
True friendship is the best gift in life.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
Rainer Maria Rilke
In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-Gita with full understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it.
Rudolf Steiner
Wanting to change to improve a person's situation means offering him for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.
Ivan Illich
How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
I have fooled life and life has fooled me. We are quits. I say good-bye. Think sometimes in the hour of happiness of your poor, comical fool who loved you truly and so well.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Can you be grateful for everything? No. But in every moment.
David Steindl-Rast
Ah, lust! How one would like to make it the cornerstone of self! But I wouldn't go ahead and build on it if I were you.
Elfriede Jelinek
It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it.
Hans Seyle
...our philosophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes of thought such as the over-estimation of the magic of words and the belief that real processes in the external world follow the lines laid down by our thoughts.
Sigmund Freud
With the lightness of being above the clouds gently wrapped in wings of love.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The fear to love reaches sometimes the depth of a panic, resembles sometimes the fear to die.
Theodor Reik