Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 15

We learned the shocking truth that "home" isn't necessarily a certain spot on earth. It must be a place where you can "feel" at home, which means "free" to us.
Maria Augusta von Trapp
It is ridiculous to lay down to people where a thing should stand, design everything for them from the lavatory pan to the ashtray. On the contrary, I like people to move their furniture so that it suits them (not me!), and it's quite natural (and I approve) when they bring the old pictures and mementos they have come to love into a new interior, irrespective of whether they are good taste or bad.
Adolf Loos
Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Poetry in the dark of the night you are my torch.Poetry makes you believe in the freedom in your own home.Poetry causes the increase of the human race.Poetry ennobles the spirit of man.Poetry is like a noble fragrance that caresses your soul.Poetry is the royal essence of beauty.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Poetry is the royal essence of beauty.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
All things want to float.
Rainer Maria Rilke
He who knows the 'Why' for his existence is able to bear almost any 'How'.
Viktor E. Frankl
It was both odd and unjust, a real example of pitiful arbitrariness of existance, that you were born into a particular time & held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.
Daniel Kehlmann
I have seen the greatest artists and the most eccentric divas in music. The greater and more visionary they were, the more self-reflexive and childlike they behaved.
Christian Gansch
Let me be one of the upward and outward lookers, not one of the downward and inward lookers.
Alfred Edersheim
Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: 'The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.
Bruno Bettelheim
There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.
David Steindl-Rast
I appreciate the gratitude every day.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Can you be grateful for everything? No. But in every moment.
David Steindl-Rast
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Viktor E. Frankl
Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
If you want to hurt somebody and you want to know where his vulnerable spot is you have to know him, before you can put in the right dig, that's very important.
Heinz Kohut
Adapting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one.
Hans Selye
Indeed, not all attacks—especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin—are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.
Hans Selye
I, however, have really never been anywhere yet, not because some sins or other could wrap themselves around me there, but because I'd rather sin at home, where God even announces the weather to me in advance on TV, slowly, so that I can write it down, in case it's worth the proper guilt. Sinning is enough, there's no need for surprises as well.
Elfriede Jelinek
Bertha divined what an enormous wrong had been wrought against the world in that the longing for pleasure is placed in woman just as in man; and that with women that longing is a sin, demanding expiation, if the yearning for pleasure is not at the same time a yearning for motherhood.
Arthur Schnitzler
They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they spread their wingsare they wakers of a wind:as if God with his broad sculptor-hands leafed through the pagesin the dark book of the beginning.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse.
Wilhelm Reich
But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.
Stefan Zweig
Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. "Migratory cancer cells" are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political.It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!
Wilhelm Reich
Justice is the cardinal virtue of peace.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Justice has a right to protest against injustice.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
When I discussed the nature of value, I observed that value is nothing inherent in goods and that it is not a property of goods. But neither is value an independent thing. There is no reason why a good may not have value to one economizing individual but no value to another individual under different circumstances. The measure of value is entirely subjective in nature, and for this reason a good can have great value to one economizing individual, little value to another, and no value at all to a third, depending upon the differences in their requirements and available amounts. What one person disdains or values lightly is appreciated by another, and what one person abandons is often picked up by another.
Carl Menger
The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.
Ivan Illich
A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.
Peter L. Berger
...The existence or non-existence of an undefined 'god' are quite poin
Herman Bondi
If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.
Sigmund Freud
Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in comforting them, in reconciling them to life and in making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of attempting to alter the existing conditions. But what do we see instead? We see that an appallingly large number of people are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke which must be shaken off; and that these people either do everything in their power to change that civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing to do with civilization or with a restriction of instinct. At this point it will be objected against us that this state of affairs is due to the very fact that religion has lost a part of its influence over human masses precisely because of the deplorable effect of the advances of science. We will note this admission and the reason given for it, and we shall make use of it later for our own purposes; but the objection itself has no force.It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not. They have always known how to externalize the precepts of religion and thus to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to ensure obedience to religion, met them half-way in this. God's kindness must lay a restraining hand on His justice. One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then one was free to sin once more. Russian introspectiveness has reached the pitch of concluding that sin is indispensable for the enjoyment of all the blessings of divine grace, so that, at bottom, sin is pleasing to God. It is no secret that the priests could only keep the masses submissive to religion by making such large concessions as these to the instinctual nature of man. Thus it was agreed: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful. In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to man’s happiness, susceptibility to culture and moral control are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we are not overrating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it.
Sigmund Freud
Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other.
Hermann Bondi
By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were.
Erwin Schrödinger
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'.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.
Erwin Schrödinger
By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were....Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.
Erwin Schrödinger
I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.
Sigmund Freud
It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.
Franz Kafka
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
Sigmund Freud
We allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow- but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision
Muhammad Asad
In this world of endless opportunities our dreams compete. If we wait to start a journey, the destination may not be anymore what we wanted to find.
Gisela Hausmann
We belong far less to where we've come from than where we want to go.
Franz Werfel
The only journey is the one within.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The vast majority of administrators, at all times and in all societies, are prone to commit grievous errors if left entirely to their own devices. Hence, they should not be left to their own devices, and should be allowed to govern only in consultation with the accredited representatives of the whole community, which is one of the classical lessons of history that no nation may neglect except at its own peril.
Muhammad Asad
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Ludwig von Mises
If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
Ludwig von Mises
When individuals combine in a joint effort to realize ends the have in common, the organizations, like the state, that they form for this purpose are given their own system of ends and their own means. But any organization thus formed remains one "person" among other, in the case of the state much more powerful than any of the others, it is true, yet still with its separate and limited sphere in which alone its ends are supreme.
Friedrich A. Hayek
The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
Ludwig von Mises
No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
Ludwig von Mises
It is be­cause freedom means the renun­ciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
Edward L. Bernays
The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.
Ludwig von Mises
Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Every socialist is a disguised dictator.
Ludwig von Mises
Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.
Ludwig von Mises