Karl Kraus Quotes

198 Sourced Quotes

The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love.

Karl Kraus
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

Karl Kraus
Progress … has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

Karl Kraus
The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Karl Kraus
I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.

Karl Kraus
Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.

Karl Kraus
Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while cleaning them.

Karl Kraus
An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

Karl Kraus
There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

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

Karl Kraus
I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.

Karl Kraus
A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!

Karl Kraus
The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes a man.

Karl Kraus
On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.

Karl Kraus
If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.

Karl Kraus
A comprehensive education is a well-stocked pharmacy: but we have no assurance that potassium cyanide will not be administered fora head cold.

Karl Kraus
The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.

Karl Kraus
Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.

Karl Kraus
If the earth had any idea of how afraid the comet is of contact with it.

Karl Kraus
How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another.

Karl Kraus
It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.

Karl Kraus
Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.

Karl Kraus
The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember.

Karl Kraus
I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.

Karl Kraus
Love thy neighbor as thyself. Because each of us is his own neighbor.

Karl Kraus
Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.

Karl Kraus
Satire chooses and knows no objects. It arises by fleeing from them and their forcing themselves upon it.

Karl Kraus
A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.

Karl Kraus
A father's pride, laid on thick, has always made me wish that the fellow had at least experienced some pain during procreation.

Karl Kraus
Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

Karl Kraus