Playwrights From Austria

"Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth."

"Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit."

"As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy."

"To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past."

"We live through myriads of seconds, but there is only one second among all these myriads which brings our whole inner world to the boil; the second in which, as Stendhal described, there suddenly takes place a crystallization in the supersaturated blood; a magical second like that of procreation, and, like it, hidden in the warm interior of one's own body, invisible, intangible, impalpable, a unique experience of mystery. No algebra of the soul can calculate it; no alchemy can divine it. Usually, even for ourselves, it remains unsearchable."

"My father was a schoolmaster in a little North German town, and for the very reason that at home culture was a means of livelihood, I detested learning and literature from childhood onwards. That is nature's way. In pursuance of her mysterious design to safeguard the creative faculty, she is apt to make children scorn their father's bent. She does not want to encourage an easy, effortless acceptance of a heritage, a mere handing down of acquisitions from one generation to the next. She sows the seeds of discord, and will only allow children to follow in their parent's footsteps after they have made laborious but fruitful detours."

"There is no understanding of the past without personal experience, without reliving it in imagination. A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance."

"He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. We must approach knowledge from the inside; inspired by passion."

"To the young, what can be more disturbing, what more unsettling and tantalizing, than the play of vague suspicions? The fancy, ceasing to wander in the void, concentrates upon a definite aim, and luxuriates in the febrile pleasures of the chase."

"Nothing moves young people so much as to witness a sublime and virile gloom. Michelangelo's thinker staring down into the abyss of his own thoughts, Beethoven's poignantly drawn lips; these tragical masks of universal suffering touch the crude emotions of youth far more than Mozart's silver melodies or the crystalline light that radiates from Leonardo's figures. Being itself beauty, youth has no need of transfiguration. In the superabundance of its vital forces, it is allured by the tragical, and in its inexperience, is prone to accept the embraces of melancholy. That, too, is why youth is always ready for danger, and ever willing to extend a brotherly hand towards mental pain."

"Youth is always right. Those who follow the counsels of youth are wise."

"England rose before our eyes; the island girdled by the stormy waters in which all the continents of the globe are laved. In that sea-girt isle, the ocean holds sway. The cold and clear gaze of the watery element is reflected in the eyes of the inhabitants. Every one of the dwellers in that land is one of the sea-folk, is himself an island. The storms and dangers of the sea have left their mark, and live on to-day in these English, whose ancestors for centuries were vikings and sea-raiders. Now peace broods over the isle. But the dwellers therein, used to storms, crave for the lie of the sea with its daily perils. When it is denied them, they create its stormy likeness for themselves in blood-sports. They build wooden lists for beast-baiting. The voluptuous horror of the spectators is stimulated in bestial fashion by watching cock-fights or by looking on while bears are torn by dogs. Soon here is a demand for a loftier tension of the senses, such as can be derived from the spectacle of heroic human conflicts. Thus there grows out of the medieval religious mysteries, the great drama of human effort, in which the adventures and the voyages of earlier days are depicted - voyages no longer sailed on a real sea, but on the inner sea of man's feelings. A new infinity, another ocean with spring tides of passion and an uprush of the spirit; a determination to steer a course through the waters on which heretofore they were driven at the mercy of winds and waves - such are the new longings of the late-born and vigorous Anglo-Saxon race. Such is the origin of the Elizabethan drama."

"When a man has a passion for a woman, and when that passion is of such a nature that he regards her with reverent admiration as an image of purity, none the less, in the unconscious, his desires turn towards bodily fulfillment, none the less the goal of physical possession is prefigured in the deepest recesses of his imagination. But when the passion is confined to the realm of the spirit, and, in that realm, is a man's passion for a man, how can it seek fulfillment? Unrestingly, the fancy wanders over the honored form, flaming up again and again to fresh ecstasy, but never finding repose in a last surrender. It flows on without pause in a current that can never empty the reservoir from which it comes. This passion is insatiable, as the spirit invariably is."

"Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger."

"Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it."

"All office workers are afraid of being late for work."

"In the end one needs forbearance to get by in this world."

"The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite."

"He looked at her again, now with the vague abject shyness that older men often have with young women, as though asking their indulgence for no longer being young."

"Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it's gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny."

"Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage."

"Someone who's on top of the world isn't much of an observer: happy people are poor psychologists. But someone who's troubled about something is on the alert. The perceived threat sharpens his senses - he takes in more than he usually does."

"Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still."

"Malice is always lucky."

"The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it."

"There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one."

"Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do."

"Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable."

"Ever since the war he's had a low opinion of people and of nations, they're selfish, all of them, without the imagination to see the injustices they're perpetrating. The idealism of his youth, a belief in the moral mission of mankind and the enlightened spirit of the white race that he took from the lectures of John Stuart Mill and his followers, was buried once and for all in the bloody mire of Ypres and the chalk quarry at Soissons where his son met his death. Politics disgusts him, the cool conviviality of the club and the showy self-congratulation of the public banquet repel him; since the death of his son he's avoided making new acquaintances. His own generation's sour unwillingness to recognize the truth and its inability to adapt to the postwar era anger him, as does the younger generation's smart-alecky thoughtlessness. But with this girl he's regained belief, a vague devout gratitude for the mere existence of youth; in her presence he sees that one generation's painfully acquired mistrust of life is fortunately neither understood nor credited by the next, and that each new wave of youth is a new beginning."

"I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else."

"Let the famous not denounce fame. Far from being empty and meaningless, it fills those it touches with divine power."

"Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?"

"I'd wish the government took honest people into consideration, it shows enough consideration for scoundrels."

"When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental—far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns."

"Translation: Nothing conveys the feeling of infinity as much as stupidity does."

"Lord, forgive them, for they know what they do!"

"To be human is erroneous."

"Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein."

"You don't even live once."

"The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature."

"Life is an effort that deserves a better cause."

"Family life is an encroachment on private life."

"Squeeze human nature into a straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear!"

"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."

"The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable."

"The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner."

"A cigar," said the altruist, "a cigar, my good man, I cannot give you. But any time you need a light, just come round, mine is always lit."

"When someone has behaved like an animal, he says: "I'm only human!" But when he is treated like an animal, he says: "I'm human, too!""

"The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes a man."