It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.
I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.
Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.
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.
My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.
The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one’s own.
One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.
The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.
One cleans someone else’s threshold of consciousness only if one’s own home is dirty.
The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.
There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.
If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.
It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.
It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.
Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.
Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.
I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.
I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.
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.