Schnitzler Quotes & Sayings

When you cannot love or hate anymore, then where is the charm of life? — Arthur Schnitzler

Sleep does make us all equal, it seems to me, like his big brother-Death. — Arthur Schnitzler

To be practical in life means to take everything seriously and nothing tragically. — Arthur Schnitzler

Most people who have been done a favor consider it an opportunity to show their incorruptibility rather than their gratitude. This is not only considerably cheaper morally, but it sometimes increases their pride so much that pretty soon they look down on their benefactor. — Arthur Schnitzler

I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born. — Eric Kandel

To be ready is one thing, to be able to wait is another; but to seize the right moment is everything. — Arthur Schnitzler

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief. — Arthur Schnitzler

So these - these were the Wanderings for which the youth of Vienna had yesterday sent him their thanks. Had he deserved them? He would not have been able to say. The whole sorry life that he had led now passed through his mind. Never had he felt so deeply that he was an old man, that not only the hopes, but also the disappointments lay far behind him. A dull hurt rose up in him. He put the book aside, he could not read on. He had the feeling that he had long since forgotten about himself. — Arthur Schnitzler

Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them. — Arthur Schnitzler

It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory. — Arthur Schnitzler

It seemed to her as if it had been an unpleasant day. She went over the actual events in her mind, and was astonished to find that, after all, the day had been like many hundreds before it and many, many more that were yet to come. — Arthur Schnitzler

There are all kinds of flight from responsibility. There is a flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. — Arthur Schnitzler

No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love. — Arthur Schnitzler

Ghosts! - They exist, they exist! Dead things playing at being alive. — Arthur Schnitzler

Am I sure? Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth. — Arthur Schnitzler

Bertha divined what an enormous wrong had been wrought against the world in that the longing for pleasure is placed in woman just as in man; and that with women that longing is a sin, demanding expiation, if the yearning for pleasure is not at the same time a yearning for motherhood. — Arthur Schnitzler

You never so much want to be happy with a woman as when you know that you're ceasing to care for her. — Arthur Schnitzler

It seemed to him a thousand times worse to stand there as the only one unmasked amid a host of masks, than suddenly to stand naked among those fully dressed. — Arthur Schnitzler

I write of love and death. What other subjects are there? — Arthur Schnitzler

Von Schnitzler's job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR - anything from news items to game shows to 'Dallas' - and rip it to shreds. 'That man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn't credible. You'd come away feeling sullied, as if you'd spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone. — Anna Funder

This is called My Youth in Vienna. It's a very nice edition
an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, 'with thanks for the Auerisms.' [ ... ] Here he apologizes for writing so much on 'the so-called Jewish question.' But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth. [ ... ] 'Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.' [ ... ] He wrote that in the early 1900s. The imagery is very chilling, is it not, in the light of what followed ... — Geraldine Brooks