Karl Kraus Quotes

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

A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.

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

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

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

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

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

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.

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

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

Children today laugh at fathers who tell them about dragons. It is necessary to make fear a required subject; otherwise children will never learn it.

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

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

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.

Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.

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

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

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

A comprehensive education is a well-stocked pharmacy: but we have no assurance that potassium cyanide will not be administered fora head cold.

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

My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

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

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

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

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

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

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

Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people; everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise.

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

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

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.

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

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

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.

Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.

Humanity and bestiality: when will the former finally be uttered with the flavor of hate and the latter with the flavor of love? Does a lion tear his fellow lion to pieces?

The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.

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

One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.

Since the law prohibits the keeping of wild animals and I get no enjoyment from pets, I prefer to remain unmarried.

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

Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.

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

Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.

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

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

I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.