Kraus Quotes & Sayings

You're insane.' The officer says, shaking his head, 'What about the Bible? What about the Good Word?'
'Oh, that's all made up, ain't it?' She tells him with a shrug, 'I ain't done most of the stuff that you says I done. — Emma Rose Kraus

No one ... can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people. — Chris Kraus

Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and share commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally. — Chris Kraus

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

You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do. — Jim Kraus

In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year. — Karl Kraus

It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it. — Karl Kraus

Nowadays the thief cannot be distinguished from his victim. Neither has any valuable objects on him. — Karl Kraus

The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man. — Karl Kraus

One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long. — Karl Kraus

Such a shovel, it seemed a waste not to use it. — Daniel Kraus

A man's jealousy is a social institution; a woman's prostitution is an instinct. — Karl Kraus

Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience
this is what you get if you haven't sinned. — Karl Kraus

The real truths are those that can be invented. — Karl Kraus

Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth? — Karl Kraus

They judge lest they be judged. — Karl Kraus

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws. — Karl Kraus

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

There is no more unhappy being under the sun than a fetishist who pines for a boot and has to content himself with an entire woman. — Karl Kraus

Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them. — Karl Kraus

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. — Karl Kraus

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. — Karl Kraus

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom. — Karl Kraus

Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it ismainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code. — Karl Kraus

To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so. — Karl Kraus

The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember. — Karl Kraus

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis. — Karl Kraus

Where do I find the time for not reading so many books? — Karl Kraus

The leaves drifted silently to the ground in the crisp autumn air. I inhaled deeply, the smell of burning bonfires far, far away enchanting my nostrils.
Autumn had come early this year and I was excited for the change in colors that had already begun to take over the trees of the forest that surrounded Grandmother's house. — Emma Rose Kraus

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust. — Karl Kraus

I am not for women but against men. — Karl Kraus

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

I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants. — Karl Kraus

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean. — Karl Kraus

Remaining adolescent means rejecting all compensatory lies about one's life ... — Chris Kraus

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. — Karl Kraus

Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write. — Karl Kraus

He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent. — Karl Kraus

Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense. — Chris Kraus

I don't like anyone. I don't understand why that's so difficult for people to understand. — Daniel Kraus

I want to be known by people who are knowledgeable about opera, who appreciate bel canto singing, people who have more sensitivity. — Alfredo Kraus

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin. — Karl Kraus

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

Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest. — Karl Kraus

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

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards. — Karl Kraus

So ask me if I am alright.
'I'm fine; I'm always fine.'
You see this look in my eyes.
'No, I'm fine. I am always fine.'
There is a corpse behind my smile.
'Listen, I am fine. Always, always fine as fine can be.'
'Are you okay?'
'I am more than okay. I am more than fine. I am wonderful! — Emma Rose Kraus

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? — Karl Kraus

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. — Karl Kraus

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden. — Karl Kraus

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. — Karl Kraus

Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed. — Karl Kraus

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt. — Karl Kraus

There is a cultural taste which tries very hard to get rid of the lice in a fur coat. There is another which tolerates the lice and thinks the coat can be worn with them in it. And finally there is a taste which regards the lice as the most important thing about the coat and consequently places the coat at the lice's disposal. — Karl Kraus

Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair. — Karl Kraus

Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein. — Karl Kraus

I would have stage-fright if I had to speak with every one of the people before whom I speak. — Karl Kraus

Any time you build a company designed to be sold, you ultimately get less value if it's sold. — Joe Kraus

Don't forget to balance optimism with fact and belief with reality. — Joe Kraus

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies. — Karl Kraus

Medicine: Your money and your life! — Karl Kraus

No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form. — Chris Kraus

A bibliophile has approximately the same relationship to literature as a philatelist to geography. — Karl Kraus

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

Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself, ... panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut. — Chris Kraus

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. — Karl Kraus

The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love. — Karl Kraus

The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span. — Karl Kraus

When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room. — Karl Kraus

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them. — Karl Kraus

A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. — Karl Kraus

You shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you're a portable saint. Knowing you is like knowing Jesus. There are billions of us and only one of you so I don't expect much from you personally. There are no answers to my life. But I'm touched by you and fulfilled just by believing. — Chris Kraus

The Girl does not dream. The Girl has never dreamed. — Emma Rose Kraus

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

Those who depend on television as their primary information source are condemned to ... A form of political illiteracy. — Bill Kraus

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. — Karl Kraus

Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn't lack. It's surplus energy- a claustrophobia inside your skin - — Chris Kraus

I found the second story that I'd ever written, 20 years ago in Wellington. It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don't think anyone will listen. — Chris Kraus

How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another. — Karl Kraus

I have often been asked to be fair and view a matter from all sides. I did so, hoping that something might improve if I viewed allsides of it. But the result was the same. So I went back to viewing things only from one side, which saves me a lot of work and disappointment. For it is comforting to regard something as bad and to be able to use one's prejudice as an excuse. — Karl Kraus

Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram. — Karl Kraus

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women. — Karl Kraus

The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, "We got there first!" It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them. — Karl Kraus

Dear Dick, I wrote in one of many letters, what happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it's least described — Chris Kraus

He who sleeps half a day has won half a life. — Karl Kraus

To be perfect, one lacks only a defect. — Karl Kraus

Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought. — Karl Kraus

To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism. — Karl Kraus

Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet's last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn't the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? — Chris Kraus

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. — Karl Kraus

A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality. — Karl Kraus

There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for. — Karl Kraus

Last week at school Pam Struger wondered why the brilliant girls all die. — Chris Kraus

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought. — Karl Kraus

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. — Karl Kraus

The discovery of the North Pole is one of those realities which could not be avoided. It is the wages which human perseverance pays itself when it thinks that something is taking too long. The world needed a discoverer of the North Pole, and in all areas of social activity, merit was less important here than opportunity. — Karl Kraus

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know. — Karl Kraus

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics. — Karl Kraus

What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined. — Daniel Kraus

The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood. — Karl Kraus