Karl Kraus Quotes - Page 10

I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.

The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.

A man's jealousy is a social institution; a woman's prostitution is an instinct.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.

Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience--this is what you get if you haven't sinned.

If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.

Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.

I am not for women but against men.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

A father's pride, laid on thick, has always made me wish that the fellow had at least experienced some pain during procreation.

When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

To be perfect, one lacks only a defect.

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.

One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one's skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.

Nothing is more horrible than my self in the mirror of hysteria. Nothing is more vulgar than my style in the hands of another. Toimitate me is to punish me.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

I like to hold a monologue with women. But a dialogue with myself is more stimulating.