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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget."
"A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock."
"As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude."
"The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher."
"It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost."
"Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water."
"Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?"
"Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation."
"The world is the totality of facts, not of things."
"A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him."
"Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?"
"Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning."
"If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'."
"Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe."
"It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it."
"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."
"I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful."
"All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot."
"Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses."
"We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism."
"One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."
"Fate determines many things, no matter how we struggle."
"Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical."
"What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural."
"Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question "Why?""
"Restrictionistic ideas have never met with any measure of popular sympathy except after a time of monetary depreciation when it has been necessary to decide what should take the place of the abandoned inflationary policy."
"I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future."
"We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us."
"Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."
"The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life."
"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
"I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me."
"Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way."
"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."
"War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods."
"One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer."
"Judgement does not come suddenly, the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement."
"The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing."
"With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will."
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