Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 8

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.
Adalbert Stifter
Only the guilty and the lovers really fear. The first because of what they are, the second for what they might lose.
Jonathan Carroll
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
Franz Kafka
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
Stefan Zweig
This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
Karl Kraus
It's a messy business, dying,' he said. 'As time goes on there's just less and less of you. It happens quickly for some; for others it can drag on. Starting from birth you keep losing one thing after another: first a finger, than an arm, first a tooth, then a whole set of teeth, first one memory, then all your memory, and so on and so forth, until one day there's nothing left. Then they chuck what's left of you in a hole and shovel it in and that's your lot.
Robert Seethaler
And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.
Rainer Maria Rilke
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Franz Kafka
There are several cats smoothly moving about, which helped me greatly to relax, for I have always felt that no house is wholly bad where there are cats, and conversely, where there are several cats, a house is bound to be wonderfully charming.
Hans Holzer
Talent is hereditary; it may be the common possession of a whole family (eg, the Bach family); genius is not transmitted; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual.
Otto Weininger
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
...we take care not to touch each other in public, nor do we look into each other's eyes except furtively, because Ivan must first wash my eyes with his own, removing the images which landed on my retina before his arrival.
Ingeborg Bachmann
All right then, I’ll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there’s a little anger for you lurking in one corner of my heart.
Franz Kafka
Devil has to offer many diabolical grimaces: One of these caricatures is prejudice, it stirs up hatred.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Before you speak words of hatred, so count with peace in your voice to ten.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The old sporadic fanaticism of religious hatred had been skillfully perverted into the cold, steady fanaticism of national hate.
Franz Werfel
On the way of perfection; often, there are healing steps into the void.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
She was 3/4 perfection and 1/4 broken glass.
Jonathan Carroll
Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man.Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
Billy Wilder
A magic came out of your smileGold thread of gold threadStars illuminating the skyThereWhere in the mountain streamHealing waterTears of ice as a gift to me
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Christmas used to be a good "idea" 'til somebody came up with the concept of giving wrapped up presents to each other... :-)
oliver mally
Death is our friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.
Marie Antoinette
There were millions of such families anxious only for peace and quiet in their own little nests. These were the mounting blocks by which the criminals climbed to power and kept it.
Simon Wiesenthal
In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commitments to the better at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs. Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation of what is possible, while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have and what they are about to get are equally exasperating to them. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation. Judgement on precedents has lost its value.
Ivan Illich
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.
Sigmund Freud
Every day is one step closer to the precious truth; ervery day can teach you the wonder, if you're willing to see those.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.
Lise Meitner
O smile, going where? O upturned look:new, warm, receding surge of the heart--;alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic spacewe dissolve in taste of us? Do the angelsreclaim only what is theirs, their own outstreamed existence,or sometimes, by accident, does a bit of usget mixed in? Are we blended in their featureslike the slight vagueness that complicates the looksof pregnant women? Unnoticed by them in theirwhirling back into themselves? (How could they notice?)
Rainer Maria Rilke
seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
Alfred Adler
A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
Jonathan Carroll
Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.
Viktor E. Frankl
He was the kind of young man whose handsome face has brought him plenty of success in the past and is now ever-ready for a new encounter, a fresh-experience, always eager to set off into the unknown territory of a little adventure, never taken by surprise because he has worked out everything in advance and is waiting to see what happens, a man who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman's sensuality, and explores it, without discriminating between his friend's wife and the parlour-maid who opens the door to him. Such men are described with a certain facile contempt as lady-killers, but the term has a nugget of truthful observation in it, for in fact all the passionate instincts of the chase are present in their ceaseless vigilance: the stalking of the prey, the excitement and mental cruelty of the kill. They are constantly on the alert, always ready and willing to follow the trail of an adventure to the very edge of the abyss. They are full of passion all the time, but it is the passion of a gambler rather than a lover, cold, calculating and dangerous. Some are so persistent that their whole lives, long after their youth is spent, are made an eternal adventure by this expectation. Each of their days is resolved into hundreds of small sensual experiences - a look exchanged in passing, a fleeting smile, knees brushing together as a couple sit opposite each other - and the year, in its own turn, dissolves into hundreds of such days in which sensuous experience is the constantly flowing, nourishing, inspiring source of life.
Stefan Zweig
The ability to ask questions is a virtue and a trait of a free thinker.
Sabina Nore
Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world'.Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Erwin Schrödinger
I gave up drinking coffee for you. I swapped pizza for produce, and this is what I get in return?
Barbara Valentin
To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German.
Emperor Charles V
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
Sigmund Freud
We can all participate in the heritage of man. We all can help to preserve it. And we can all make our own modest contribution to it.We must not as for more.
Karl R. Popper
We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity … in fact our movement is Christian.
Adolph Hitler
A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance.
Robert Musil
Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.
Ivan Illich
Guilt is never to be doubted.
Franz Kafka
I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.
Hans Selye
One hears a great many things, true, but can gather nothing definite.
Franz Kafka
Everything that has been wrestled from doubtI welcome-the mouths that burst open afterlong knowledge of what it is to be mute.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.
Rainer Maria Rilke
My heart is your home.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Love is an eternal shining star.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.
Peter F Drucker
Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
Peter F Drucker
The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.
Peter F Drucker
This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
Peter F Drucker
Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society - and especially in the economy - as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is "creative destruction.
Peter F Drucker
The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.
Peter F Drucker
If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer”"Se alla mattina quando ti alzi non pensi altro che allo scrivere allora sei uno scrittore
Rainer Maria Rilke
How come you're so different, I asked once, as we sat in the shade of the pine tree. Yukiko's answer, a sentence learned by heart: Because I fell from a star.
Milena Michiko Flašar
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
Stefan Zweig