Austrian Author Quotes

Rainer Maria Rilke

Elfriede Jelinek

Arthur Schnitzler

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Peter Handke

Ingeborg Bachmann

Felix Salten

She moves the way clocks move. And on her face, as on a clock dial which someone shines a light onto at night, a strange, briefly shown hour stands: a terrifying hour, in which someone dies.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy is he who can forget what cannot be changed.

Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.

Eligius Franz Joseph von Münch-Bellinghausen

The more a thing is torn,
the more places it can connect.

Meredith Stricker

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

Franz Grillparzer

An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time

Without a doubt the sense of beauty does not lie determined in the concreteness of an individual beautiful thing or person. Rather its purpose is much more the enchantment of the soul, for there is nothing physical that is not made with the intent of affecting the soul, and there is no soul that does not intend to dazzle everything physical with its sensations.

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Sleep does make us all equal, it seems to me, like his big brother-Death.

Arthur Schnitzler

The main thing:... not to let myself be defined by history, not to take it as an excuse—despise it in those who hide their personal insignificance behind it—and yet know it, in order to understand people and above all to see through them (my hatred of history as a refuge for be-nothings).

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.

Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!

Elfriede Jelinek

I have often been told, on the occasion of the publication of some important scientific work, that 'whatever there is true in it is not new, and what is new is not true.' This means in plain language: 'we understand what we know, but that which we ought to know, we do not understand.'

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Apocalypse is the eye of a needle, through which we pass into a different world.

George Zebrowski

Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it's only feigned.

Thomas Bernhard

Singing is near miraculous because it is the mastering of what is otherwise a pure instrument of egotism: the human voice.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

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

He did not feel the ground under his feet - he thrust himself into the capriole, rose high in the air-forelegs and hind legs horizontal. He soared above the ground, he head in jubilation. Conquering!

Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch