Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 6

There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
Peter F Drucker
As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.
Viktor E. Frankl
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive.
Franz Kafka
No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it
Karl R. Popper
As once the winged energy of delightcarried you over childhood's dark abysses,now beyond your own life build the greatarch of unimagined bridges.Wonders happen if we can succeedin passing through the harshest danger;but only in a bright and purely grantedachievement can we realize the wonder.To work with Things in the indescribablerelationship is not too hard for us;the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,and being swept along is not enough.Take your practiced powers and stretch them outuntil they span the chasm between twocontradictions...For the godwants to know himself in you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
She is so distinct to me, it's as though I had run my hands all over her.
Franz Kafka
Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the f
Rainer Maria Rilke
But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.
Viktor E. Frankl
It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power
Wilhelm Reich
476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite?For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.
Hermann Broch
You see, when you're young and foolish it doesn't matter where you may be, you always think that you'll be happier somewhere else.
Felix Salten
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
Ivan Illich
Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed from matriarchy to patriarchy and class society, the unity of religious and sexual cult underwent a split; the religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual. With that, the cult of sexuality went out of existence. It was replaced by the brothel, pornography and backstairs-sexuality. It goes without saying that when sexual experiences ceased to be one with the religious cults, when, instead, they became antithetical to them, religious excitation assumed a new function: that of being a substitute for the lost sexual pleasure, now no longer affirmed by society. Only this contradiction inherent in religious excitation makes the strength and the tenacity of the religions understandable: the contradiction of its being at one and the same time antisexual and a substitute for sexuality.
Wilhelm Reich
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mystical organizations are only a crystallization of facts which can be found, in a more diffuse and less tangible form, in all strata of people. The degree of mystical, sentimental and sadistic feelings corresponds exactly to the degree of the disturbance of natural orgastic experience. Close observation of the audience of a trashy thriller or of a boxing match teaches more about these problems than a hundred handbooks of sexology.
Wilhelm Reich
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
Franz Kafka
To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German.
Emperor Charles V
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Sigmund Freud
You don't believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can't bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think 'about' you, or 'for your benefit', not 'with' you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas.
Wilhelm Reich
Feelings are for the soul what food is for the body.
Rudolf Steiner
One class. No masters. No slaves. No black. No white. No Jew. No Christian. One race-- The human race.
Edith Hahn Beer
The fear to love reaches sometimes the depth of a panic, resembles sometimes the fear to die.
Theodor Reik
The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
Joseph Schumpeter
I will hide my heart in your heart and you will hide your heart in my heart; and no evil eye will hear it, our common heart, as familiar, in unison, it throbs to the world.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
Karl Kraus
Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex. Normally, sex is a mode of expression for love. Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love. Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.
Viktor E. Frankl
Every girl would like to marry a rich husband. I did twice. But what divides girls into two groups is this question - do you first think of money and then love, or vice versa?
Hedy Lamarr
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
Stefan Zweig
In those days, he said the following: I can only give you a little; but that little, I give to you with love.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize he will still for months wake up in the night with a start worrying about food and rent.
Vicki Baum
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
Adolf Hitler
They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they spread their wingsare they wakers of a wind:as if God with his broad sculptor-hands leafed through the pagesin the dark book of the beginning.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer”"Se alla mattina quando ti alzi non pensi altro che allo scrivere allora sei uno scrittore
Rainer Maria Rilke
A third group of inflationists do not deny that inflation involves serious disadvantages. Nevertheless, they think that there are higher and more important aims of economic policy than a sound monetary system. They hold that although inflation may be a great evil, yet it is not the greatest evil, and that the State might under certain circumstances find itself in a position where it would do well to oppose greater evils with the lesser evil of inflation.
Ludwig von Mises
Voters thereby prove themselves bad and indeed corrupt judges of such issues and often they even prove themselves bad judges of their own long-run interests, for it is only the short-run promise that tells politically and only short-run rationality that asserts itself effectively.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow.
Ludwig von Mises
Loving isn't merging, surrendering, uniting with the other. Rather, it's a kind of solitude; of profound aloneness. It induces you to mature and become whole for the sake of your beloved ... to truly love another, you must first wholly love yourself. Love therefore exacts the most demanding claim of all; it both chooses you and pursues you, and reaches out, as if over vast distances, to call and draw you into your now and future self."-- John VanDyke Wilmerding, ideas put forth inspired by ('after') Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.
Thomas Bernhard
Wishes are memories coming from our future!
Rainer Maria Rilke
Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.
Thomas Bernhard
In addition, I had the greatest interest in anything connected with politics, but this did not seem to me very significant. On the contrary: in my eyes, this was the self-evident duty of every thinking man, Anyone who failed to understand this lost the right to any criticism or complaint
Adolf Hitler
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Franz Kafka
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks the ultimate the last test and proof the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. This is what determines the quality of the life we’ve lived — not whether we’ve been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger.
Victor E. Frankl
It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?
Franz Kafka
Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it.
Otto Rank
One of the greatest things in human life is the ability to make plans. Even if they never come true-the joy of anticipating is irrevocably yours. That way one can live many more than just one life.
Maria Augusta von Trapp
Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.
Adolf Hitler
We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge.
Erwin Schrödinger
Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within.
Ivan Illich
But all remains unchanged.
Franz Kafka
In an old family albumEver again you return, Melancholy,O meekness of the solitary soul.A golden day glows and expires.Humbly the patient man surrenders to painRinging with melodious sound and soft madness.Look! There's the twilight.Night returns once more and a mortal thing lamentsAnd another suffers in sympathy.Shuddering under autumn starsYearly the head is bowed deeper.-Georg Trakl (1887-1914)
Georg Trakl
All real living is meeting.
Martin Buber