Karl KrausThinkers

An Aphorism is never exactly true... it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

Art is light synthesis whereas science is spectral analysis.

Art is so perfectly clear that no one comprehends it.

Authorship is part and parcel of the work itself: a poem is often good until one knows who wrote it.

Beauty is complicated. A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

Berlin is a place where things are serious but not hopeless. In vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.

Boredom is an art. A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him while an artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

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

Corruption is worse than prostitution — The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

Cosmetics is the science of a woman's cosmos.

Crime is the unsurprising result of squeezing human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice.

Crime is that which appears when human nature is squeezed into the straitjacket of criminal justice.