Karl Kraus Quotes

198 Sourced Quotes

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

Karl Kraus
Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

Karl Kraus
It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.

Karl Kraus
One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.

Karl Kraus
Anesthesia: wounds without pain. Neurasthenia: pain without wounds.

Karl Kraus
An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.

Karl Kraus
The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.

Karl Kraus
Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

Karl Kraus
Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.

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

Karl Kraus
The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.

Karl Kraus
The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

Karl Kraus
When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.

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

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

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
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