Karl Kraus Quotes

198 Sourced Quotes

Nationalism is the love which ties me to the blockheads of my country, to the insultors of my way of life, and to the desecrators of my language.

Karl Kraus
Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music.

Karl Kraus
To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.

Karl Kraus
Religion, morality, and patriotism are feelings that are manifested only when they are outraged.

Karl Kraus
Ingratitude is often disproportionate to the benefaction received.

Karl Kraus
That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there--and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.

Karl Kraus
If something is stolen from you, don't go to the police. They're not interested. Don't go to a psychologist either, because he's interested in only one thing: that it was really you who did the stealing.

Karl Kraus
When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.

Karl Kraus
There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.

Karl Kraus
The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.

Karl Kraus
A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

Karl Kraus
There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.

Karl Kraus
Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Karl Kraus
What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

Karl Kraus
Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people; everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise.

Karl Kraus
If you wish to form a clear judgment on your friends, consult your dreams.

Karl Kraus
The pimp is the executive organ of immorality. The executive organ of morality is the blackmailer.

Karl Kraus
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Karl Kraus
My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.

Karl Kraus
A pun, though despicable in itself, can be the noblest vehicle of an artistic intention by serving as the abbreviation of a wittyview. It can be a social criticism in the form of an epigram.

Karl Kraus
Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.

Karl Kraus
Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

Karl Kraus
A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.

Karl Kraus
What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?

Karl Kraus
In the theater one must sit in such a way that one sees the audience as a dark mass. Then it cannot bother one more than it does an actor. Nothing is more disturbing than being able to distinguish individuals in the crowd.

Karl Kraus
The art of an actress is sublimated sexuality. But off the stage the fire must be able to reconvert the steam into body.

Karl Kraus
If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me.

Karl Kraus
How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

Karl Kraus
Through my satire I make little people so big that afterwards they are worthy objects of my satire and no one can reproach me any longer.

Karl Kraus
Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.

Karl Kraus