Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 23

Our knowledge can only be finite while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Karl Popper
The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation.
Ludwig von Mises
At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on their side:­ tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument, this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is derived from it.
Sigmund Freud
With the aid of a minute correction - that of the dispersing lens - in a gold frame perched on her nose, Miranda can see into hell.
Ingeborg Bachmann
For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a gross immorality in itself, for morality lives and dies with the human endeavour to establish its victory upon earth.
Muhammad Asad
Concerning this a man once said:Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parablesyou yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.Another said: I bet that is also a parable.The first said: You have won.The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.The first said: No, in reality; in parable you have lost.
Franz Kafka
I believe I've found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.
Konrad Lorenz
His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.
Ivan Illich
Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
And in fact the artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of "heat" one could say "sex";- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church, - then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Incidentally, it’s easy to write prescriptions, but difficult to come to an understanding with people.
Franz Kafka
The notes I can handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes-ah, that is where the art resides.
Artur Schnabel
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
Before it was usual to acquire goods in the market, not for personal consumption, but simply in order to exchange them again for the goods that were really wanted, each individual commodity was only accredited with that value given by the subjective valuations based on its direct utility. It was not until it became customary to acquire certain goods merely in order to use them as media of exchange that people began to esteem them more highly than before, on account of this possibility of using them in indirect exchange. The individual valued them in the first place because they were useful in the ordinary sense, and then additionally because they could be used as media of exchange. Both sorts of valuation are subject to the law of marginal utility.
Ludwig von Mises
Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic.
Viktor E. Frankl
You go back to the gym and you just do it again and again until you get it right.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.
Viktor E. Frankl
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud
Wherever you go, wherever you stay - there is eternity.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.
Lise Meitner
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.
Sigmund Freud
Real love is always chaotic. You lose control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect yourself. The greater the love, the greater the chaos. It’s a given and that’s the secret.
Jonathan Carroll
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.
Artur Schnabel
Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Oh well, memories, said I. Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don't let yourself in for things like that, it's not for you and not for me. It only weakens one's present position without strengthening the former one - nothing is more obvious - quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn't need strengthening.
Franz Kafka
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.
Ludwig von Mises
The attempt to restrain prices within limits has to be given up. A government that sets out to abolish market prices is inevitably driven towards the abolition of private property.
Ludwig von Mises
The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.
Konrad Lorenz
You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an "illogical" world would look like.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
They talk about prohibition in America. What can one do in a country such as that?   'What does one do in America when one is sad - without alcohol?' asks Zwonimir.
Joseph Roth
His urbane brain cut the most magnificent capers, as, chloroformed by fatigue, it directed its incoming perceptions along the most absurd paths and enjoyed the utter senselessness of its associations.
Gerhard Roth
What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.
Karl R. Popper
Sometimes reality is a fantastically traumatic nightmare.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.
Erwin Schrödinger
The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.
Franz Kafka
It was not sympathy in the ordinary sense which he [Adolf Hitler] felt for the disinherited. That would not have been sufficient. He not only suffered with them, he lived for them and devoted all his thoughts to the salvation of those people from distress and poverty... his noble and grandiose work, which was intended 'for everybody'...
August Kubizek
The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.
Ivan Illich
For when the Law of Price declares that a good actually commands a particular price, and explains why it does so, it of course implies that the good is able to command this price, and explains why it is able to do so. The Law of Price comprehends the Law of Exchange-Value.
Ludwig von Mises
Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.
Carl Menger
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives?
Wilhelm Reich
In a sweet way, my thoughts, are embedded in love.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make himself richer and others poorer by the violent oppression and spoliation of his fellow men.
Ludwig von Mises
If you are a success in life, there are places you must go and pay to be humiliated. It is an unwritten law that human beings must be tormented throughout their lives in one way or another. If you are fortunate enough to have risen to a social level where no one does it to you for free, then you must pay for the service.
Jonathan Carroll
In the sky, far above - Where my words - Written in the Clouds; I've borrowed from the sun, A gentle smile.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
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
I love youMy life stretched over a bridgeI need youMy life stretched over you
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
All right then, I’ll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there’s a little anger for you lurking in one corner of my heart.
Franz Kafka
We also want to leave our own area behind, our domestic world so well regulated day to day; we are drawn by the desire no longer to be at home and therefore no longer to be ourselves. We want to interrupt a life where we merely exist, in order to live more.
Stefan Zweig
Under bilateral competition, market-price is determined within a range whose upper limit is set by the valuations of the lowest bidder among the actual buyers and the highest offerer among the excluded would-be sellers, and whose lower limit is set by the valuations of the lowest offerer among the actual sellers and the highest bidder among the excluded would-be buyers.
Ludwig von Mises
The meaning of world is the separation of wish and fact.
Kurt Gödel
Every minute of life I take a risk it's part of the enjoyment.
Otto Preminger