Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus was an Austrian journalist, satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet.
Sourced
- There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.
- Sprüche und Widersprüche (Dicta and Contradictions) (1909); as translated by Richard Hanser
- What is the Ninth Symphony compared to a Tin Pan Alley hit played on a hurdy-gurdy and a memory?
- Sprüche und Widersprüche (Dicta and Contradictions)
- Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.
- Beim Wort genommen (1955); as translated by by Harry Zohn
Die Fackel
- Quotations from Die Fackel as translated in Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (1976) by Thomas Stephen Szasz
- An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.
- Die Fackel no. 270/71 (1909-01-19)
- Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.
- Die Fackel no. 315/16 (1911-01-26)
- The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
- Die Fackel no. 406/12 (1915-10-05)
- My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.
- Die Fackel no. 445/53 (18 January 1917)
- War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
- Die Fackel no. 46 (9 October 1917)
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
- Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1990) as translated by Harry Zohn
- Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
- I hear noises which others don't hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don't hear either.
- Many share my views with me. But I don't share them with them.
- It so often happened to me that someone who shared my opinion kept the larger share for himself that I am now forewarned and offer people only ideas.
- Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.