Best 13 quotes of Arthur Schnitzler on MyQuotes

It is better to put on the brakes sooner, for some fine day you begin to understand — to pardon everything — and then where is the charm of life, if you cannot love or hate any more?

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

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

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

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.

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

The principal task of friendship is to foster one`s friends` illusions.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.