top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Austrian Authors
"Our greatest stupidities may be very wise."
"We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work."
"Above all, in comedy, and again and again since classical times, passages can be found in which the level of representation is interrupted by references to the spectators or to the fictive nature of the play."
"I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original."
"Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life."
"The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)"
"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
"In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world."
"In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: 'I wish you luck.' I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more."
"A scientist who cannot prove what he has accomplished, has accomplished nothing."
"Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy."
"Directing her was like directing Lassie. You need 14 takes to get each one of them right."
"We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for."
"There was a certain point in my life where I had to decide that I was going to take my future and Nicole's and not wallow in what happened to me because when you do that, you just keep repeating what's been happening and at some point you have to make a choice."
"Not what we experience, but how we perceive what we experience, determines our fate."
"If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done."
"This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person, whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated."
"Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything."
"Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth."
"Music is music whether it is for the stage, rostrum or cinema ."
"I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time."
"It occurs to me that I really can't remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see."
"Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times."
"It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all....."
"Things are not as we would like them to be. There is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself."
"I am my world."
"For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules."
"If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest."
"The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated."
"How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me."
"I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be on one's guard against them."
"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."
"Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie."
"But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing."
"Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of 'pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism."
"Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it."
bottom of page