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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again."
"Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony."
"Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them."
"Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business."
"The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings."
"The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety."
"What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem."
"No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself."
"It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love."
"I employ 20 people in Vienna. The other 130 coworkers are pilots and flight companions. The Overhead is limited with me. Reduces naturally the costs of my fliers."
"Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs."
"The role played by man in production always consists solely in combining his personal forces with the forces of Nature in such a way that the cooperation leads to some particular desired arrangement of material. No human act of production amounts to more than altering the position of things in space and leaving the rest to Nature."
"Fay has spirituality too, but she also has that very real sex appeal that takes hold of the hearts of men."
"The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others' labor."
"Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former."
"No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude."
"The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on."
"On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room."
"We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium."
"Two minutes later the right arm was pointing normally and the reaction to the left appeared. The patient made no complaint at all about the experiment."
"In the morning we received some very thin coffee. For lunch we had potato soup with a few pieces of meat in it, in the evening we had a very thin meat soup with some potatoes in it."
"The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude."
"As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man."
"I beg of you... never assume an inner or an outer pose, never a disguise."
"If I have a stupid day, everything looks wrong to me."
"Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron."
"There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world."
"I'm a sworn enemy of convention. I despise the conventional in anything, even the arts."
"Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
"Signs of fatigue soon manifested themselves more and more strongly, and slowly the men dropped out one by one, from sheer exhaustion. No murmur of complaint, however, would be heard."
"There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again."
"I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine."
"I do not know who there is among us that can claim to know God's purpose and God's intent."
"I'd rather wear jewels in my hair than anywhere else. The face should have the advantage of this brilliance."
"The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort."
"Political courage is not political suicide."
"How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world."
"A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own 'accuracy.'"
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