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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"I listened more than I studied... therefore little by little my knowledge and ability were developed."
"It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of one's relationship with that person and how it can fail to influence that person."
"Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed."
"A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion."
"One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others."
"Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours."
"It is a great consolation for me to remember that the Lord, to whom I had drawn near in humble and child-like faith, has suffered and died for me, and that He will look on me in love and compassion."
"The publication of the third volume of Capital has made hardly any impression upon bourgeois economic science."
"Earlier lives drift by on silver soles, and the shadows of the damned descend into these sighing waters."
"I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow."
"If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this."
"Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?"
"From that moment on I knew my profession in life was and has remained until today an actor's life."
"Right up to the middle of this century all perceptions of the world around us were delivered via the bookshelf or the paper route."
"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm."
"Music conveys to us itself!"
"The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are."
"Belief in the causal nexus is superstition."
"Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them."
"Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived - not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger."
"It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor."
"Jack Kennedy always said to me, Hedy, get involved. That's the secret of life. Try everything. Join everything. Meet everybody."
"But whether, for example, a coat can be exchanged for twenty yards of linen cloth or for forty yards is not a matter of chance, but depends upon objective conditions, upon the amount of socially necessary labor time contained in the coat and in the linen respectively."
"Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth. Through all of them runs, like a red thread, the hidden Science of attaining and maintaining wakefulness."
"You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend."
"It is a great deal of difference to receive an honorary title or a title in his profession."
"Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one."
"A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view."
"The screen magnifies everything, even the way you are thinking."
"Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized."
"It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves."
"Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates."
"You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded."
"Every true, eternal problem is an equally true, eternal fault; every answer an atonement, every realisation an improvement."
"If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life."
"We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean."
"If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization."
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