Quotes from Karl Kraus

I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.

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.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be living in retirement.

Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illnes for which it regards itself a therapy.

Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.

Sexual enlightenment is justified insofar as girls cannot learn too soon how children do not come into the world.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.

The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.

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.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

A weak man has doubts before a decision; a strong man has them afterwards.

To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to man, not to other dogs.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.