Quotes by Austrian Authors

Man's attitude toward great qualities in others is often the same as toward high mountains - he admires them but he prefers to walk around them.
Moritz Saphir
All art is erotic.
Gustav Klimt
Vanity and superficiality, placed deliberately on display, can be a burden; take this nonsense overboard.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
But had Minkowski and Einstein not recognized it long before us, our schizophrenic children would have taught us that space-time is a unity that precedes any separate understanding of either category; just as grasping this unity is a precondition for understanding causality.
Bruno Bettelheim
When, thirty-five years ago, I tried to give a summary of the ideas and principles of that social philosophy that was once known under the name of liberalism, I did not indulge in the vain hope that my account would prevent the impending catastrophes to which the policies adopted by the European nations were manifestly leading. All I wanted to achieve was to offer to the small minority of thoughtful people an opportunity to learn something about the aims of classical liberalism and its achievements and thus to pave the way for a resurrection of the spirit of freedom after the coming debacle.
Ludwig von Mises
You must not blame us scientists for the use which war technicians have put our discoveries.
Lise Meitner
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Happiness is so simple in life:If I laugh then you are laughing too.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
In youth we learn in age we understand.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus
Every writer without exception is a masochist a sadist a peeping Tom an exhibitionist a narcissist an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.
Edmund Bergler
Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender that is strength.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
To really enjoy the better things in life one must first have experienced the things they are better than.
Oscar Homolka
Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize he will still for months wake up in the night with a start worrying about food and rent.
Vicki Baum
Do your duty until it becomes your joy.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Work and love - these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
Theodor Reik
Man works primarily for his own self-respect and not for others or for profit. . . the person who is working for the sake of his own satisfaction the money he gets in return serves merely as fuel that is as a symbol of reward and recognition in the last analysis of acceptance by one's fellowmen.
Otto Rank
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In our civilization men are afraid they will not be men enough and women are afraid they might be considered only women.
Theodor Reik
The great question which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul is "what does a woman want"?
Sigmund Freud
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
Belief is harder to shake than knowledge.
Adolf Hitler
Analogies it is true decide nothing but they can make one feel more at home.
Sigmund Freud
He who lives in the present lives in eternity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power.
Rudolph Steiner
The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and of humanity.
Alfred Adler
Of course he seems to have quite a mind of his own and that is probably where he is weakest.
Arnold Schoenberg
Nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
Rainer Maria Rilke
No one really understands the grief or joy of another.
Franz Schubert
A woman who is loved always has success.
Vicki Baum
Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.
Vicki Baum
Whenever you see a successful business someone once made a courageous decision.
Peter Drucker
Success which is something so simple in the end is made up of thousands of things we never fully know what.
Rainer Maria Rilke
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement - and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.
Viktor Frankl
The Holy Spirit . . . wants to flow through us and realize all these wonderful possibilities in the world - if we only open ourselves and allow it to happen.
Br. David Steindl-Rast
They understand but little who understand only what can be explained.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
If your daily life seems poor do not blame it blame yourself tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves or you will never find it.
Bertha von Suttner
As far as your self-control goes as far goes your freedom.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate this belief the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If there be a faith that can move mountains it is faith in one's own power.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Conquer but never triumph.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
Anna Freud
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Sigmund Freud
Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain?
Rainer Maria Rilke
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Sigmund Freud
Every minute of life I take a risk it's part of the enjoyment.
Otto Preminger
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
Franz Kafka
When a man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
Sigmund Freud
Hindsight is always zo/20.
Billy Wilder
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.
Sigmund Freud
We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.
Thomas Bernhard
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
We must prepare and study truth under every aspect endeavoring to ignore nothing if we do not wish to fall into the abyss of the unknown when the hour shall strike.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Nor it is an objection to say that we must understand a prayer if it is to have its true effect. That simply is not the case. Who understands the wisdom of a flower? Yet we can take pleasure in it.
Rudolph Steiner
He who gladly does without the praise of the crowd will not miss the opportunity of becoming his own fan.
Karl Kraus
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations.
Sigmund Freud
Doubt breeds doubt.
Franz Grillparzer
To heal ourselves we also have to heal society.
Riane Eisler