Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 5

I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.
Franz Kafka
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.
Franz Kafka
That...that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting...but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistance.
Stefan Zweig
No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.
Viktor E. Frankl
Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.
Alfred Adler
Being busy helping customers meant that I had no time to train the way I was used to, with an intense four-or five-hour workout each day. So I adopted the idea of training twice a day, two hours before work and two hours from seven to nine in the evening, when business slacked off and only the serious lifters were left. Split workouts seemed like an annoyance at first, but I realized I was onto something when I saw the results: I was concentrating better and recovering faster while grinding out longer and harder sets. On many days I would add a third training session at lunchtime. I'd isolate a body part that I thought was weak and give it thirty or forty minutes of my full attention, blasting twenty sets of calf raises, say, or one hundred triceps extensions. I did the same thing some nights after dinner, coming back to train for an hour at eleven o'clock. As I went to sleep in my snug little room, I'd often feel one or another muscle that I'd traumatized that day jumping and twitching-just a side effect of a successful workout and every pleasing, because I knew those fibers would now recover and grow.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Kurt Marnul can win Mr. Austria," I thought, "and he's already told me that I could too if I train hard, so that's what I'm going to do." This thought made the hours of lifting tons of steel and iron actually a joy. Every painful set, every extra rep, was a step toward my goal of winning Mr. Austria and entering the Mr. Europe competition.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa.
Bruno Bettelheim
The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.
Fritjof Capra
But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?
Martin Buber
Having been is the surest kind of being.
Viktor E. Frankl
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.
Rainer Maria Rilke
This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped.
Emil Artin
You have to be the right type for calm waters. For some, dead calm is inner peace, for others it's the doldrums.
Daniel Glattauer
The best way to find inner peace is the practice in forbearance.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
He had a voice you couldn't miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.
Rainer Maria Rilke
He had probably been thrown out of a wine shop, and it hadn't quite dawned on him yet.
Franz Kafka
And so we are like flowers; and bloom only, when the sun, kisses us.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some.
Herbert Rappaport
There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
[on why he considers Marlon Brando and Jean-Louis Trintignant to be his favorite actors] They don't externalize or project everything. They keep a mystery within themselves, and that I think is the sign of a truly great actor, to be able to maintain that.
Michael Haneke
If your inner silence begins to wear a silk fruit; only then, the day will reveal to you its hidden secret.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Sigmund Freud
But a person, I would say, is an individual living really with the world. And 'with' the world, I don't mean in the world- just in real contact, in real reciprocity with the world in all the points in which the world can meet man.
Martin Buber
The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.
Franz Grillparzer
I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Random search for data on ... off-chance is hardly scientific. A questionnaire on 'Intellectual Immoralities' was circulated by a well-known institution. 'Intellectual Immorality No. 4' read: 'Generalizing beyond one's data'. [Wilder Dwight] Bancroft asked whether it would not be more correct to word question no. 4 'Not generalizing beyond one's data.
Hans Selye
Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.
Franz Kafka
The discovery of an interaction among the four hemes made it obvious that they must be touching, but in science what is obvious is not necessarily true. When the structure of hemoglobin was finally solved, the hemes were found to lie in isolated pockets on the surface of the subunits. Without contact between them how could one of them sense whether the others had combined with oxygen? And how could as heterogeneous a collection of chemical agents as protons, chloride ions, carbon dioxide, and diphosphoglycerate influence the oxygen equilibrium curve in a similar way? It did not seem plausible that any of them could bind directly to the hemes or that all of them could bind at any other common site, although there again it turned out we were wrong. To add to the mystery, none of these agents affected the oxygen equilibrium of myoglobin or of isolated subunits of hemoglobin. We now know that all the cooperative effects disappear if the hemoglobin molecule is merely split in half, but this vital clue was missed. Like Agatha Christie, Nature kept it to the last to make the story more exciting. There are two ways out of an impasse in science: to experiment or to think. By temperament, perhaps, I experimented, whereas Jacques Monod thought.
Max F. Perutz
My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it.
Hans Seyle
Intrusive, thoughtless people!" said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agreed with him, at least K. thought that was what he saw from the corner of his eye. But it was just as possible that he had not even been listening as he had his hand pressed firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers.
Franz Kafka
Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The ovation roared around him. He felt nothing in particular, hardly even the embarrassment he had feared. He had to go up again—this time without Fräulein Gasteiner, and it was a little peculiar to him to hear the noise of clapping hands and the loud shouts of "Bravo". He bowed several times, turned to the door and then, just as the clapping was getting weaker, he heard a voice from slightly behind him, or to the side—he couldn't quite tell—but the words were perfectly distinct, no matter how quietly they had been said: "Poor devil!" He wanted to look around, but he felt that that would seem absurd.
Arthur Schnitzler
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
Franz Kafka
Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
Sigmund Freud
The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history -- which is of course part of natural history -- and pass it on in falsified form just because it is customary to do so, when we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form.
Thomas Bernhard
Basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same thing
Adolf Hitler
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.
Ludwig von Mises
Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation—the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
All Nazi champions insist again and again that Marxism and Bolshevism are the quintessence of the Jewish mind, and that it is the great historic mission of Nazism to root out this pest. It is true that this attitude did not prevent the German nationalists either from coöperating with the German communists in undermining the Weimar Republic, or from training their black guards in Russian artillery and aviation camps in the years 1923–1933, or— in the period from August, 1939, until June, 1941—from entering into a close political and military complicity with Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, public opinion supports the view that Nazism and Bolshevism are philosophies—Weltanschauungen—implacably opposed to each other.
Ludwig von Mises
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
E.H. Gombrich
Morning birdsong filled the room. For all his high opinion of birds, privileged among God's creatures, still, deep in his heart, the Emperor did not trust them, just as he did not trust artists.
Joseph Roth
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
Peter F Drucker
What's measured improves
Peter F Drucker
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Peter F Drucker
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.
Peter F Drucker
In the room...they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.
Robert Musil
This existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
Victor Frankl Auschwitz
THE UNICORN: The saintly hermit, midway through his prayersstopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witnessthe unbelievable: for there before him stoodthe legendary creature, startling white, thathad approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.The legs, so delicately shaped, balanced abody wrought of finest ivory. And ashe moved, his coat shone like reflected moonlight.High on his forehead rose the magic horn, the signof his uniqueness: a tower held upright by his alert, yet gentle, timid gait.The mouth of softest tints of rose and grey, whenopened slightly, revealed his gleaming teeth,whiter than snow. The nostrils quivered faintly:he sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.His eyes looked far beyond the saint's enclosure,reflecting vistas and events long vanished,and closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend.
Rainer Maria Rilke
...I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are.
Felix Salten
Perplexity is the beginning of a new way.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
I do not know who I am, said the wise man, and went his way of knowledge unto the end of days.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
You'll learn wisdom for yourself, if you have become sedentary.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
We are fools in the stream of time, in moments of calm, we will laugh about ourselves.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
True wisdom lies in the pure roots of untouchedly souls.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.
Isidor Isaac Rabi