''One must read all writers twice—the good as well as the bad. The one kind will be recognized; the other, unmasked.''
''I trim my opponents to fit my arrows.''
''How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another.''
''Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.''
''Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the fathers as well.''
''It so often happened to me that someone who shared my opinion kept the larger share for himself that I am now forewarned and offer people only ideas.''
''Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or race hatred. To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for all. No petty prejudices!''
''There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.''
''A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.''
''What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?''
''I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.''
''Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair.''
''You don't even live once.''
''An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.''
''How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.''
''Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music.''
''I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.''
''It is uplifting to lose one's faith in a reality which looks the way it is described in a newspaper.''
''The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.''
''Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.''
''Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.''
''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.''
''A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.''
''Sound opinions are valueless. What matters is who holds them.''
''Solitude would be an ideal state if one were able to pick the people one avoids.''
''There is no doubt that a dog is loyal. But does that mean we should emulate him? After all, he is loyal to people, not to other dogs.''
''Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.''
''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.''
''Oh no, I'm not a bellyacher. My hatred of Vienna is not love gone astray. It's just that I've discovered a completely new way of finding it unbearable.''
''Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.''
''He who sleeps half a day has won half a life.''
''Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.''
''A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.''
''Ingratitude is often disproportionate to the benefaction received.''
''Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.''
''I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.''
''What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.''
''What are all the orgies of Bacchus when compared to the intoxication of someone who completely surrenders to continence!''
''Satires which the censor understands are rightly prohibited.''
''My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.''
''Anesthesia: wounds without pain. Neurasthenia: pain without wounds.''
''The real truths are those that can be invented.''
''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.''
''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.''
''I like to hold a monologue with women. But a dialogue with myself is more stimulating.''
''Your conscious probably hasn't much use for my unconscious. But I have implicit faith in my unconscious; it will be able to cope with your conscious.''
''An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.''
''It is high time for children to enlighten their parents about the secrets of sex.''
''Nothing is more horrible than my self in the mirror of hysteria. Nothing is more vulgar than my style in the hands of another. To imitate me is to punish me.''
''The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion.''
''I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.''
''The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.''
''Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authors write works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.''
''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.''
''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.''
''The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember.''
''Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.''
''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.''
''In a hollow head there is much room for knowledge.''
''A father's pride, laid on thick, has always made me wish that the fellow had at least experienced some pain during procreation.''
''The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.''
''Religion, morality, and patriotism are feelings that are manifested only when they are outraged.''
''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.''
''Humanity and bestiality: when will the former finally be uttered with the flavor of hate and the latter with the flavor of love? Does a lion tear his fellow lion to pieces?''
''Sexual enlightenment is that hardhearted process which for hygienic reasons forbids young people to satisfy their curiosity themselves.''
''If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me.''
''Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.''
''Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.''
''The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.''
''Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.''
''A weak man has doubts before a decision; a strong man has them afterwards.''
''A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.''
''"A cigar," said the altruist, "a cigar, my good man, I cannot give you. But any time you need a light, just come around; mine is always lit."''
''Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.''
''A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on non-alcoholic wine.''
''Lord, forgive them, for they know what they do!''
''When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.''
''If something is stolen from you, don't go to the police. They're not interested. Don't go to a psychologist either, because he's interested in only one thing: that it was really you who did the stealing.''
''Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.''
''War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.''
''The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.''
''She only lacked a flaw to be perfect.''
''On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.''
''Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.''
''Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.''
''When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.''
''In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.''
''An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.''
''Children today laugh at fathers who tell them about dragons. It is necessary to make fear a required subject; otherwise children will never learn it.''
''This author is so deep that it took me, the reader, a long time to get to his surface.''
''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.''
''Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.''
''It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.''
''Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.''
''To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.''
''Justice is a whore that won't let herself be stiffed, and collects the wages of shame even from the poor.''
''If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator.''
''In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.''
''Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.''
''My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.''
''Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it is mainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code.''
''The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one's own.''
''A snob is unreliable. The work he praises might just be good.''
''Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.''
''Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.''
''Democracy means the permission to be everyone's slave.''
''It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.''
''They judge lest they be judged.''
''I would have stage-fright if I had to speak with every one of the people before whom I speak.''
''You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.''
''What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.''
''Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.''
''A pun, though despicable in itself, can be the noblest vehicle of an artistic intention by serving as the abbreviation of a witty view. It can be a social criticism in the form of an epigram.''
''When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.''
''One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.''
''There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.''
''Morality is the tendency to pour out the baby with the bathwater.''
''Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.''
''Many talents preserve their precociousness right into old age.''
''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.''
''It is a mystery to me how a theologian can be praised for having brought himself to disbelieve dogmas. I've always thought that those who have brought themselves to believe in dogmas merit the true recognition owing a heroic deed.''
''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.''
''The art of an actress is sublimated sexuality. But off the stage the fire must be able to reconvert the steam into body.''
''A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!''
''I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.''
''Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.''
''Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.''
''Family life is an encroachment on private life.''
''A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.''
''Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.''
''The triumph of morality: A thief who has broken into a bedroom claims his sense of shame had been outraged, and by threatening the occupants with exposure of an immoral act he blackmails them into not bringing charges for burglary.''
''I hear noises which others don't hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don't hear either.''
''Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?''
''The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.''
''You do him an injustice. He agrees with you on everything. Except with the fact that I regard him as an ass.''
''Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.''
''One cleans someone else's threshold of consciousness only if one's own home is dirty.''
''Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune tellers to metaphysics.''
''It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.''
''Many women would like to dream with men without sleeping with them. Someone should point out to them that this is utterly impossible.''
''A man's jealousy is a social institution; a woman's prostitution is an instinct.''
''It is not true that one cannot live without a woman. It is simply that one cannot have lived without one.''
''The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.''
''Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.''
''Many share my views with me. But I don't share them with them.''
''My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.''
''In these loud times which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions.''
''I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.''
''The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.''
''Two people did not get married. Since then they have been living in mutual widowhood.''
''The pimp is the executive organ of immorality. The executive organ of morality is the blackmailer.''
''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.''
''Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.''
''Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.''
''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.''
''The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.''
''X said disparagingly that nothing would remain of me but a few good jokes. That, at least, would be something, but unfortunately not even that will remain, for the few good jokes were stolen long ago—by X.''
''A bibliophile has approximately the same relationship to literature as a philatelist to geography.''
''Satire chooses and knows no objects. It arises by fleeing from them and their forcing themselves upon it.''
''The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.''
''Hate must make a person productive; otherwise one might as well love.''
''Ask your neighbor only about things you know better yourself. Then his advice could prove valuable.''
''Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.''
''News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.''
''Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.''
''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.''
''Nationalism is the love which ties me to the blockheads of my country, to the insultors of my way of life, and to the desecrators of my language.''
''If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.''
''The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.''
''I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.''
''A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.''
''Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.''
''Nowadays the thief cannot be distinguished from his victim. Neither has any valuable objects on him.''
''There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.''
''Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience—this is what you get if you haven't sinned.''
''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.''
''I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment to acquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education.''
''The blind won't admit that I have eyes in my head, and the deaf say that I'm dumb.''
''Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time writing essays.''
''The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.''
''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.''
''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 the stocking.''
''The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors.''
''I am not for women but against men.''
''Why, he's the one who thought I've forgotten that I don't know him!''
''Penalties serve to deter those who are not inclined to commit any crimes.''
''The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.''
''If you wish to form a clear judgment on your friends, consult your dreams.''
''Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?''
''Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.''
''Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.''
''A poem is good until one knows by whom it is.''
''So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes—with the exception of their occupation.''
''Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.''
''The slave! She does with him just as he pleases.''
''Since the law prohibits the keeping of wild animals and I get no enjoyment from pets, I prefer to remain unmarried.''
''Humanity is the washerwoman of society that wrings out its dirty laundry in tears.''
''War is 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.''
''Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.''
''Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.''
''No, there won't be any scar left on the soul. The bullet will have gone in mankind's one ear and out the other.''
''To be human is erroneous.''
''My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.''
''Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.''
''Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.''
''Education is what most people receive, many pass on, and few have.''
''Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.''
''The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.''
''Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.''
''Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.''
''Psychology is a bus that accompanies an airplane.''
''My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.''
''Once upon a time the actors were genuine and the decorations of cardboard; nowadays the decorations do not give rise to doubt—and the actors are of cardboard.''
''A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.''
''An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.''
''A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.''
''Medicine: "Your money and your life!"''
''If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.''
''One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.''
''There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman's shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.''
''Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.''
''A good writer does not receive anywhere near the number of poison-pen letters that is commonly assumed. Among a hundred jackasses there are not ten who will admit to being jackasses, and at most one who will put it in writing.''
''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 comprehensive education is a well-stocked pharmacy: but we have no assurance that potassium cyanide will not be administered for a head cold.''
''It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.''
''Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.''
