Quote

Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise.

Karl Kraus

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Karl Kraus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: March 28
Died: 1936
Died: June 12
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
Jicin
Like
Goes
Italian
People
Week
Weeks
Heard
Arise
Word
Manage
Irksome
Two
Communication
Clockwork
Live
Havens
August
Everything
Haven
Misunderstanding
Way
Understood
German

More quotes by Karl Kraus

Image
A comprehensive education is a well-stocked pharmacy: but we have no assurance that potassium cyanide will not be administered fora head cold.
Karl Kraus
Image
Cosmetics is the science of a woman's cosmos.
Karl Kraus
Image
Morality is the tendency to pour out the baby with the bathwater.
Karl Kraus
Image
What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.
Karl Kraus
Image
Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.
Karl Kraus
Image
Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.
Karl Kraus
Image
Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.
Karl Kraus
Image
It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
Karl Kraus
Image
Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.
Karl Kraus
Image
I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.
Karl Kraus
Image
Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.
Karl Kraus
Image
My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.
Karl Kraus
Image
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
Karl Kraus
Image
It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.
Karl Kraus
Image
A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.
Karl Kraus
Image
To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.
Karl Kraus
Image
Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience--this is what you get if you haven't sinned.
Karl Kraus
Image
Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.
Karl Kraus
Image
The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.
Karl Kraus
Image
The art of an actress is sublimated sexuality. But off the stage the fire must be able to reconvert the steam into body.
Karl Kraus