Quotes from Karl Kraus

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.

Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.

Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.

An aphorism is never exactly true. It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.

It is not true that one cannot live without a woman. It is simply that one cannot have lived without one.

There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

Cosmetics is the science of a woman's cosmos.

An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.

Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.

Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.

A snob is unreliable. The work he praises might just be good.

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

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.

A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Art is something that is so perfectly clear that no one comprehends it.

The art of an actress is sublimated sexuality. But off the stage the fire must be able to reconvert the steam into body.

It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

The blind won't admit that I have eyes in my head, and the deaf say that I'm dumb.

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

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.