Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 9

We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents...Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.
Viktor E. Frankl
You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
Billy Wilder
Freedom" -- we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours.
Viktor E. Frankl
It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
The SolitaryAs one who has sailed across an unknown sea,among this rooted folk I am alone;the full days on their tables are their own,to me the distant is reality.A new world reaches to my very eyes,a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;their slightest feelings they must analyze,and all their words have got the common tune.The things I brought with me from far away,compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:in their great country they were living things,but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Man works primarily for his own self-respect and not for others or for profit. . . the person who is working for the sake of his own satisfaction the money he gets in return serves merely as fuel that is as a symbol of reward and recognition in the last analysis of acceptance by one's fellowmen.
Otto Rank
Wisdom too often never comes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
Felix Frankfurter
Bondage And Service - that was what they all demanded and from everyone. This craving to find themselves in another, to subjugate and appropriate foreign territory, to create a new field for their own will in a second body, foreign flesh for their own soul; this greedy, consuming hunger devoured every other desire, and they called it friendship!
Hermann Bahr
The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This is the creature there has never been.They never knew it, and yet, none the less,they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.Not there, because they loved it, it behavedas though it were. They always left some space.And in that clear unpeopled space they savedit lightly reared its head, with scarce a traceof not being there. They fed it, not with corn,but only with the possibilityof being. And that was able to confersuch strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.within the silver mirror and in her.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.
Franz Kafka
I stepped forward as commanded, wondering which of the many rules I had broken now.
Georg Rauch
For hundreds, even thousands, of years, people completely failed to see that variations in the objective exchange-value of money could be induced by monetary factors. They tried to explain all variations of prices exclusively from the commodity side.
Ludwig von Mises
In case of doubt decide in favor of what is correct.
Karl Kraus
Inflationism is that monetary policy that seeks to increase the quantity of money.
Ludwig von Mises
weren’t you alwaysdistracted by expectation, as if every eventannounced a beloved? (Where can you find a placeto keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside yougoing and coming and often staying all night.)…
Rainer Maria Rilke
The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.
Hans Selye
Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own instead of someone else's.
Billy Wilder
seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
Alfred Adler
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.
Wilhelm Reich
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor E. Frankl
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
Karl Kraus
I have learned through dreams more wisdom, than by reading hundreds of books.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation
Franz Kafka
Perplexity is the beginning of a new way.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
Franz Kafka
At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.
Rainer Maria Rilke
That said the conspirators: Tell us your secret and we will have betrayed you for a lifetime.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.
Ivan Illich
Hence, the statement that the cost of living is different in different localities only means that the same individual cannot secure the same degree of satisfaction from the same stock of goods in different places.
Ludwig von Mises
The Apple Orchard Come let us watch the sun go downand walk in twilight through the orchard's green.Does it not seem as if we had for longcollected, saved and harbored within usold memories? To find releases and seeknew hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,mingled with darkness coming from within,as we randomly voice our thoughts aloudwandering beneath these harvest-laden treesreminiscent of Durer woodcuts, brancheswhich, bent under the fully ripened fruit,wait patiently, trying to outlast, toserve another season's hundred days of toil,straining, uncomplaining, by not breakingbut succeeding, even though the burdenshould at times seem almost past endurance.Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!Thus must it be, when willingly you strivethroughout a long and uncomplaining life,committed to one goal: to give yourself!And silently to grow and to bear fruit.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The discovery of an interaction among the four hemes made it obvious that they must be touching, but in science what is obvious is not necessarily true. When the structure of hemoglobin was finally solved, the hemes were found to lie in isolated pockets on the surface of the subunits. Without contact between them how could one of them sense whether the others had combined with oxygen? And how could as heterogeneous a collection of chemical agents as protons, chloride ions, carbon dioxide, and diphosphoglycerate influence the oxygen equilibrium curve in a similar way? It did not seem plausible that any of them could bind directly to the hemes or that all of them could bind at any other common site, although there again it turned out we were wrong. To add to the mystery, none of these agents affected the oxygen equilibrium of myoglobin or of isolated subunits of hemoglobin. We now know that all the cooperative effects disappear if the hemoglobin molecule is merely split in half, but this vital clue was missed. Like Agatha Christie, Nature kept it to the last to make the story more exciting. There are two ways out of an impasse in science: to experiment or to think. By temperament, perhaps, I experimented, whereas Jacques Monod thought.
Max F. Perutz
When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in, in every state that we imagine ourselves in.
Thomas Bernhard
The gift within every gift is always opportunity.
Steindl Rast David
Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives.
Viktor E. Frankl
The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in "material" but in "spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature.Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the "age of the atom bomb.
Wilhelm Reich
Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The music is not in the notes,but in the silence between.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There, Where love lives is Heaven on earth.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
If love disappear forever, a veil of sadness, falls over the valley of dried tears.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Greed:Your own lies make you sick.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Before you speak words of hatred, so count with peace in your voice to ten.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
Thomas Bernhard
All actual life is encounter.
Martin Buber
Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.
Martin Buber
Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa.
Bruno Bettelheim
How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!
Stefan Zweig
Nobody, said Humboldt, had a destiny. One simply decided to feign one until one came to believe in it oneself. But so many things didn't fit in with it, one had to really force oneself.
Daniel Kehlmann
When I discussed the nature of value, I observed that value is nothing inherent in goods and that it is not a property of goods. But neither is value an independent thing. There is no reason why a good may not have value to one economizing individual but no value to another individual under different circumstances. The measure of value is entirely subjective in nature, and for this reason a good can have great value to one economizing individual, little value to another, and no value at all to a third, depending upon the differences in their requirements and available amounts. What one person disdains or values lightly is appreciated by another, and what one person abandons is often picked up by another.
Carl Menger
Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.
Stefan Zweig
It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.
Bruno Bettelheim
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
Martin Buber
A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Sigmund Freud
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one — if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.
Sigmund Freud
You're my love, you're my lighthouse; and the sea is rough in the dark days.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The most dreadful part of all," the old stag answered, "is that the dogs believe what the hound just said. They believe it, they pass their lives in fear, they hate Him and themselves and yet they'd die for His sake.
Felix Salten