Arthur Schnitzler Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The ovation roared around him. He felt nothing in particular, hardly even the embarrassment he had feared. He had to go up again - this time without Fräulein Gasteiner, and it was a little peculiar to him to hear the noise of clapping hands and the loud shouts of "Bravo". He bowed several times, turned to the door and then, just as the clapping was getting weaker, he heard a voice from slightly behind him, or to the side - he couldn't quite tell - but the words were perfectly distinct, no matter how quietly they had been said: "Poor devil!" He wanted to look around, but he felt that that would seem absurd.

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

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.

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

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.

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