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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"If only your pure and clean mind could touch me, dear Haydn, nobody has a greater reverence for you than I have."
"Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life."
"To measure is to determine the ratio of one quantity to another which is invariable or assumed to be invariable. Invariability in respect of the property to be measured, or at least the legitimacy of assuming such invariability, is a sine qua non of all measurement. Only when this assumption is admissible is it possible to determine the variations that are to be measured."
"Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes."
"The marginal utility of money to any individual, i.e., the marginal utility derivable from the goods that can be obtained with the given quantity of money or that must be surrendered for the required money, presupposes a certain exchange-value of the money; so the latter cannot be derived from the former. 1 Those who have realized the significance of historically-transmitted values in the determination of the objective exchange-value of money will not find great difficulty in escaping from this apparently circular argument."
“Within a world of free trade and democracy, there are no incentives for war and conquest. In such a world, it is of no concern whether a nation's sovereignty stretches over a larger or smaller territory. Its citizens cannot derive any advantage from the annexation of a province. If territorial problems can be treated without bias and passion, it is not painful to be fair to other people's claims for self-determination.”
"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."
"A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires."
"It is no more appropriate to speak of a difference between the purchasing power of money in Germany and in Austria than it would be justifiable to conclude from differences between the prices charged by hotels on the peaks and in the valleys of the Alps that the objective exchange-value of money is different in the two situations and to formulate some such proposition as that the purchasing power of money varies inversely with the height above sea-level. The purchasing power of money is the same everywhere, only the commodities offered are not the same."
"If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude... I hope to make you use your imagination."
"The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian--an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own .... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization."
"The Jews are the enemy of National Socialism."
"A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood."
"The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model."
"No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes."
"In making theories, always keep a window open so that you can throw one out if necessary."
"Death is really a great blessing for humanity, without it there could be no real progress. People who lived for ever would not only hamper and discourage the young, but they would themselves lack sufficient stimulus to be creative."
"There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are."
"If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes."
"So soon as a fashion is universal, it is out of date."
"Many people are target people. Once when Louis B. Mayer insulted me I poured a glass of water over his head."
"Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for."
"My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write."
"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."
"There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits."
"I am so miserable, there are so many questions, I can see no way out and am so wretched and feeble that I could lie forever on the sofa and keep opening and closing my eyes without knowing the difference."
"If the objective exchange-value of money must always be linked with a pre-existing market exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods (since otherwise individuals would not be in a position to estimate the value of the money), it follows that an object cannot be used as money unless, at the moment when its use as money begins, it already possesses an objective exchange-value based on some other use."
"The Congressman ascertained that the consulate in Havana had numbers to feed the pigs."
"It is true that the speculator may happen to go astray in his estimate of future prices. What is usually overlooked in considering this possibility is that under the given conditions it is far beyond the capacities of most people to foresee the future any more correctly. If this were not so, the opposing group of buyers or sellers would have got the upper hand in the market. The fact that the opinion accepted by the market has later proved to be false is lamented by nobody with more genuine sorrow than by the speculators who held it. They do not err of malice prepense; after all, their object is to make profits, not losses."
"That the social life of human beings is subject to definite limitations; that it is governed by a set of laws that are comparable with those of Nature; these are notions that are unknown to the etatist. For the etatist, everything is a question of Macht - power, force, might. And his conception of Macht is crudely materialistic."
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