Top 200 Karl Kraus Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “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.”

— Karl Kraus

52. “The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.”

— Karl Kraus

53. “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

54. “The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

69. “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

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

74. “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

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Karl Kraus

81. “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

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

— Karl Kraus

83. “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

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

88. “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

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

— Karl Kraus

90. “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

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

95. “Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

100. “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