Quote

Let my style capture all the sounds of my time. This should make it an annoyance to my contemporaries. But later generations should hold it to their ears like a seashell in which there is the music of an ocean of mud.

Karl Kraus

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Karl Kraus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: March 28
Died: 1936
Died: June 12
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
Jicin
Sound
Capture
Music
Sounds
Make
Ears
Time
Ocean
Like
Later
Generations
Annoyance
Hold
Contemporaries
Style
Mud

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A great deal of learning can be packed into an empty head.
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To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism.
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Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.
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Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.
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Through my satire I make little people so big that afterwards they are worthy objects of my satire and no one can reproach me any longer.
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To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.
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Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.
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Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.
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The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one's own.
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Family life is an encroachment on private life.
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On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.
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That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there--and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.
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Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.
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There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.
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I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
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A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
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Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.
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This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.
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Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.
Karl Kraus