Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 29

I do not believe that, in order to be religious in the good and genuine sense of the word, one has to ruin one’s love life and has to become rigid and shrunken in body and soul.
Wilhelm Reich
There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
Franz Kafka
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Sigmund Freud
The spark of consciousness is reflected in the river, where a dance of infinite faces lined in profane lights.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
THE economic consequences of fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money have such important bearings on the life of the community and of the individual that as soon as the State had abandoned the attempt to exploit for fiscal ends its authority in monetary matters, and as soon as the large-scale development of the modern economic community had enabled the State to exert a decisive influence on the kind of money chosen by the market, it was an obvious step to think of attaining certain socio-political aims by influencing these consequences in a systematic manner. Modern currency policy is something essentially new; it differs fundamentally from earlier State activity in the monetary sphere.
Ludwig von Mises
The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian--an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own .... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.
Sigmund Freud
In meeting again after a separation acquaintances ask after our outward life friends after our inner life.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
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
Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves or you will never find it.
Bertha von Suttner
For gypsies do not like to stay -They only come to go away.
Ludwig Bemelmans
But it must be observed that as the depreciation of money proceeds, the demand for money (i.e. for the kind of money in question) gradually begins to fall. When loss of wealth is suffered in proportion to the length of time money is kept on hand, endeavours are made to reduce cash holdings as much as possible. N ow if every individual, even if his circumstances are otherwise unchanged, no longer wishes to maintain his cash holding at the same level as before the beginning of the inflation, the demand for money in the whole community, which can only be the sum of the individuals' demands, decreases too. There is also the additional fact that as commerce gradually-begins to use foreign money and actual gold in place of notes, individuals begin to hold part of their reserves in foreign money and in gold and no longer in notes.
Ludwig von Mises
The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.
Peter F Drucker
A magic came out of your smileGold thread of gold threadStars illuminating the skyThereWhere in the mountain streamHealing waterTears of ice as a gift to me
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant... is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times... Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more.
Sigmund Freud
While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.
Adolf Hitler
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I have never seen a wrestling match or prize fight, and I don't want to. When I find out a man is interested in these sports, I drop him.
Hedy Lamarr
If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin again...to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
Erwin Schrödinger
Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.
Arthur Schnitzler
People make themselves unhappy by desiring and praising only one thing, by becoming too one-sided in trying to find contentment. If we were just in harmony with ourselves we would enjoy the things of this world much more. But when we have an inordinate amount of desires and aspirations, we only listen to them, we are incapable of understanding the essential innocence of things outside ourselves. Unfortunately, we often term those things important that are the objects of our emotions, and those things that have no relation to our desires are called unimportant; however, many times it is exactly the opposite.
Adalbert Stifter
How small a thought it takes to fill a life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must strictly speaking at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Miranda doesn't dream, she simply rests. When Miranda's eyes are at ease, her mind is at peace.
Ingeborg Bachmann
Love has no expiration date; if your are willing, she will accompany you until your last day.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
There can never be surprises in logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
With the lightness of being above the clouds gently wrapped in wings of love.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
By the river of forgetfulness, I found honesty.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.
Ivan Illich
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.
Ernst Fischer
I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?
Franz Kafka
If we disregard the exchange of present goods for future goods, and restrict our considerations for the time being to those cases in which the only exchanges are those between present goods and present money, we shall at once observe a fundamental difference between the effects of an isolated variation in a single commodity-price, emanating solely from the commodity side, and the effects of a variation in the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods in general, emanating from the monetary side.
Ludwig von Mises
In youth we learn in age we understand.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
It is merely the egoism of men, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of changeable human existence, namely love. Can you deny that our Christina world is rotting?
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.
Franz Kafka
When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against Nature must lead to their own downfall.
Adolf Hitler
Art is the refreshing source of existence.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
Ludwig von Mises
In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete...Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through Galileo's telescope, so most modern economists refuse to look at an analysis that might displace the conventional centre of their economic system.
Ivan Illich
Could K. represent the congregation all by himself? What if he had been a stranger merely visiting the church? That was more or less his position.
Franz Kafka
You can rely on a stick, but not on a faithless friend.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Even Diotima and Amheim were shy of using it without a modifier, for it is still possible to speak of having a great, noble, craven, daring, or debased soul, but to come right out with "my soul" is something one simply cannot bring oneself to do. It is distinctly anolder person's word, and this can only be understood by assuming that in the course of life people become more and more aware of something for which they urgently need a name they cannot find until they finally resort, reluctantly, to the name they had originally despised. How to describe it, then? Whether one is at rest or in motion, what matters is not what lies ahead, what one sees, hears, wants, takes, masters. It forms a horizon, a semicircle before one, but the ends of this semicircle are joined by a string, and the plane of this string goes right through·the middle of the world. In front, the face and hands look out of it; sensations and strivings run ahead of it, and no one doubts that whatever one does·is always reasonable, or at least passionate. In other words, outercircumstances call for us to act in a way everyone can understand; and if, in the toils of passion, we do something incomprehensible, that too is, in its own way, understandable.
Robert Musil
A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
From the systems point of view, it is evident that one of the main obstacles to organizational change is the — largely unconscious — embrace by business leaders of the mechanistic approach to management.
Fritjof Capra
People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
Peter F Drucker
One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.
Franz Kafka
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
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
Viktor E. Frankl
Now we wake up with our memoryand fix our gazes on that which was;whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us,sits silently beside us with loosened hair
Rainer Maria Rilke
Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.
Peter F Drucker
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Viktor E. Frankl
Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?
Franz Kafka
In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.
Ivan Illich
Whenever you see a successful business someone once made a courageous decision.
Peter Drucker