Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 15

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.
Michael Haneke
We must prepare and study truth under every aspect endeavoring to ignore nothing if we do not wish to fall into the abyss of the unknown when the hour shall strike.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Depreciation of money can benefit debtors only when it is unforeseen. If inflationary measures and a reduction of the value of money are expected, then those who lend money will demand higher interest in order to compensate their probable loss of capital, and those who seek loans will be prepared to pay the higher interest because they have a prospect of gaining on capital account.
Ludwig von Mises
Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics." That testimony is particularly impressive if contrasted with Pauli's words less than five months later: "Heisenberg's type of mechanics has again given me hope and joy in life. To be sure it does not supply the solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward.
Wolfgang Pauli
And so we are seeds of love, scattered across the world, from the hands of the wind.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Etatism, as a theory, is the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, and, as a policy, the attempt to regulate all mundane affairs by authoritative commandment and prohibition. The ideal society of etatism is a particular sort of socialistic community; it is usual in discussions involving this ideal society to speak of State Socialism, or, in some connexions, of Christian Socialism.
Ludwig von Mises
Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity never of the correctness of a belief.
Arthur Schnitzler
Life as we find it is too hard for us it entails too much pain too many disappointments impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
Sigmund Freud
How come you're so different, I asked once, as we sat in the shade of the pine tree. Yukiko's answer, a sentence learned by heart: Because I fell from a star.
Milena Michiko Flašar
I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.
Hans Selye
The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.
Adolf Hitler
As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.
Hans Selye
Courage! I have shown it for years think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?
Marie Antoinette
Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
Peter F Drucker
they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.
Victor E. Frankl
Imagination makes people oversensitive,vulnerable and exposed. Perhaps it's a form of degeneracy. I have never held the shortcomings of the unimaginative against them. Sometimes I've even envied them: they have an easier and more pleasant life than everyone else.
Marlen Haushofer
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
Peter F Drucker
But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.
Stefan Zweig
We have to consider that a man who has been under such enormous mental pressure for such a long time is naturally in some danger after his liberation, especially since the pressure was released quite suddenly. This danger (in the sense of psychological hygiene) is the psychological counterpart of the bends. Just as the physical health of the caisson worker would be endangered if he left his diver's chamber suddenly (where he is under enormous atmospheric pressure), so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health.
Viktor E. Frankl
Born from sea foam high up to the tops of the waves on the trail of love.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it
Viktor E. Frankl
Love is a ray of sunshine in the days of darkness.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
So far as variations in the objective exchange-value of money are foreseen, they influence the terms of credit transactions. If a future fall in the purchasing power of the monetary unit has to be reckoned with, lenders must be prepared for the fact that the sum of money which a debtor repays at the conclusion of the transaction will have a smaller purchasing power than the sum originally lent. Lenders, in fact, would do better not to lend at all, but to buy other goods with their money. The contrary is true for debtors. If they buy commodities with the money they have borrowed and sell them again after a time, they will retain a surplus over and above the sum that they have to pay back. The credit transaction results in a gain for them. Consequently it is not difficult to understand that, so long as continued depreciation is to be reckoned with, those who lend money demand higher rates of interest and those who borrow money are willing to pay the higher rates. If, on the other hand, it is expected that the value of money will increase, then the rate of interest will be lower than it would otherwise have been.
Ludwig von Mises
It shall dwell roses, from your sweet tears in my heart.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is true that some secluded intellectuals in their esoteric circles talk differently. They proclaim the priority of what they call eternal absolute values and feign in their declamations—not in their personal conduct—a disdain of things secular and transitory. But the public ignores such utterances. The main goal of present-day political action is to secure for the respective pressure group memberships the highest material well-being. The only way for a leader to succeed is to instill in people the conviction that his program best serves the attainment of this goal.
Ludwig von Mises
And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?
Rainer Maria Rilke
And children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.
Rainer Maria Rilke
In our civilization men are afraid they will not be men enough and women are afraid they might be considered only women.
Theodor Reik
The deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman is pity.
Vicki Baum
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
Edward L. Bernays
That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us
Rainer Maria Rilke
We have absolutely no control over what happens to us in life but what we have paramount control over is how we respond to those events.
Viktor E. Frankl
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
Franz Kafka
There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.
Rainer Maria Rilke
[on his satisfaction as an artist] In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended.
Michael Haneke
Since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me — in sober truth a disinherited son — naturally I became unsure even of the thing nearest to me, my own body.
Franz Kafka
My business is to forgive others.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
To make a great dream come true, you must first have a great dream.
Hans Selye
And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It was strange to find that love does not spring from abundance and richness of the ego, but is a way out of inner distress and poverty. We were surprised to discover that our first love is not directed either to another person or to ourselves, but to an imaginary ideal ego, to an image of ourselves as we would like to be. There are stranger discoveries awaiting us the more deeply we grope in the dark and the further we intrude into the secret places of the human heart.
Theodor Reik
How strange it was, I thought, that when the tiny though thousandfold beauties of the Earth disappeared and the immeasurable beauty of outer space rose in the distant quiet splendor of light, man and the greatest number of other creatures were supposed to be asleep! Was it because we were only permitted to catch a fleeting glimpse of those great bodies and then only in the mysterious time of a dream world, those great bodies about which man had only the slightest knowledge but perhaps one day would be permitted to examine more closely? Or was it permitted for the great majority of people to gaze at the starry firmament only in brief, sleepless moments so that the splendor wouldn't become mundane, so that the greatness wouldn't be diminished?
Adalbert Stifter
If you would dance, my pretty Count, I'll play the tune on my little guitar..
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
He took the Captain as he was, and was fond of him, with his cheery heartlessness, his incapacity to think beyond a couple of thoughts, for which his skull was far too roomy, his insignificant love affairs and childish infatuations, and the pointless and unconnected remarks that came out of his mouth, seemingly at random. He was a mediocre officer, who didn't care about his comrades, his men, his career.
Joseph Roth
The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.
Bruno Bettelheim
The pygmies, for example, or the Mindoro of the Philippines, do not want equal rights – they just want to be left alone.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is no such thing as a historical fatality there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
The maladies of the spirit alone, in abstracto, that is, error and sin, can be called diseases of the mind only per analogiam. They come not within the jurisdiction of the physician, but that of the teacher or clergyman, who again are called physicians of the mind only per analogiam.
Ernst Von Feuchtersleben
Stealing isn't so easy, often it's hard work, otherwise we'd all be doing it.
Elfriede Jelinek
Love is the jewel of mankind.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Success which is something so simple in the end is made up of thousands of things we never fully know what.
Rainer Maria Rilke
So it's back once more, back up the slope.Why do they always ruin my ropewith their cuts?I felt so ready the other day,Had a real foretaste of eternityIn my guts.Spoonfeeding me yet another sipfrom life's cup.I don't want it, won't take any more of it.Let me throw up.Life is medium rare and good, I see,And the world full of soup and bread,But it won't pass into the blood for me,Just goes to my head.It makes me ill, though others it feeds;Do see that I must deny it!For a thousand years from now at leastI'm keeping a diet.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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
Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.[Songs of Longing]
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is impossible says our distressed mind; try it, whispers admonishing us, the dream.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.
Rainer Maria Rilke