Top 200 Karl Kraus Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Karl Kraus

52. “A healthy man is content with a woman. An erotic man is content with a stocking to get to a woman. A sick man is content with thestocking.”

— Karl Kraus

53. “It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.”

— Karl Kraus

54. “An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.”

— Karl Kraus

55. “A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart’s desire!”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

57. “Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.”

— Karl Kraus

58. “The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.”

— Karl Kraus

59. “Not greeting people isn’t enough. One also doesn’t greet people one doesn’t know.”

— Karl Kraus

60. “A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.”

— Karl Kraus

61. “In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.”

— Karl Kraus

62. “Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.”

— Karl Kraus

63. “Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.”

— Karl Kraus

64. “Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.”

— Karl Kraus

65. “A man’s jealousy is a social institution; a woman’s prostitution is an instinct.”

— Karl Kraus

66. “Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

68. “Humanity is the washerwoman of society that wrings out its dirty laundry in tears.”

— Karl Kraus

69. “Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.”

— Karl Kraus

70. “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

71. “Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.”

— Karl Kraus

72. “The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.”

— Karl Kraus

73. “In the theater one must sit in such a way that one sees the audience as a dark mass. Then it cannot bother one more than it does an actor. Nothing is more disturbing than being able to distinguish individuals in the crowd.”

— Karl Kraus

74. “Signori, chi ha qualcosa da dire si faccia avanti, e taccia.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

76. “The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.”

— Karl Kraus

77. “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

78. “Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.”

— Karl Kraus

79. “A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.”

— Karl Kraus

80. “War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn’t any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone’s being worse off.”

— Karl Kraus

81. “The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.”

— Karl Kraus

82. “Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair.”

— Karl Kraus

83. “One’s need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.”

— Karl Kraus

84. “The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.”

— Karl Kraus

85. “One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one’s skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.”

— Karl Kraus

86. “An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.”

— Karl Kraus

87. “My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.”

— Karl Kraus

88. “The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.”

— Karl Kraus

89. “Der Aphorismus deckt sich nie mit der Wahrheit; er ist entweder eine halbe Wahrheit oder anderthalb.”

— Karl Kraus

90. “Today’s literature: prescriptions written by patients.”

— Karl Kraus

91. “Jealousy is a dog’s bark which attracts thieves.”

— Karl Kraus

92. “Talent is often a defect in character.”

— Karl Kraus

93. “A pun, though despicable in itself, can be the noblest vehicle of an artistic intention by serving as the abbreviation of a wittyview. It can be a social criticism in the form of an epigram.”

— Karl Kraus

94. “In a hollow head there is much room for knowledge.”

— Karl Kraus

95. “Morality is a burglar’s tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.”

— Karl Kraus

96. “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

97. “Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.”

— Karl Kraus

98. “Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.”

— Karl Kraus

99. “To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.”

— Karl Kraus

100. “Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.”

— Karl Kraus