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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
"The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water."
"When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves."
"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing."
"What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree."
"For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment."
"I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up."
"Libel actions, when we look at them in perspective, are an ornament of a civilized society. They have replaced, after all, at least in most cases, a resort to weapons in defense of a reputation."
"In particular, I established a reasonably accurate energy threshold for permanent displacement of a nucleus from its regular lattice position, substantially smaller than had been previously presumed."
"Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience."
"To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation."
"Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays."
"Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another."
"Even such an obvious idea as to observe an animal with vertigo or to rotate an animal did not occur to him, in spite of the fact that he conducted numerous vertigo experiments with human subjects and made frequent use of animal experiments."
"If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?"
"If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time."
"Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it."
"The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist."
"I was now successful in proving that a direction of movement is localized in the cerebellum."
"It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it."
"Since, however, the reduced surplus value is to be distributed among them in like manner, the modification of their respective parts in the production of surplus value must find expression in a modification of the prices."
"A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants."
"Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory."
"He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found."
"The investigations also proved that there were many cases of spontaneous deviation, i.e. cases where there had been no stimulation of the semi-circular canal apparatus."
"Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms."
"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast."
"A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything."
"Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side."
"The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it."
"I don't have any gnawing guilt over contributing to any unhappiness suffered by my husbands. They were as much to blame as I was."
"The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary."
"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct."
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