Austrian Wisdom Quotes

The essential quality of a market system, contrary to popular thinking, is not that it promotes greed; but rather, that it renders greed harmless.

the longing for wisdom itself is wisdom' - 'search for a fixed point within yourself, my child, that the world cannot reach' - regard everything that happens as a lifeless painting and do not let yourself be touched by it,

A Bavarian is mixture between an Austrian and a human being." -Otto von Bismarck  

There is magic in this world,” said the woodsman to his son. “If you see, truly see, an acorn grow into a tree, and that tree be turned to lumber, and that lumber be turned into a house, you cannot doubt that magic is real.” “But, that is boring,” said the boy. “And that is the nature of magic. True magic is boring. And that is why so few people bother to do it.” - An excerpt from the Austrian collection of tales The Wisdom of the Woods, author unknown.

All that wisdom—indeed, the summation of every word on these pages—is contained in a deceptively mundane object that weighs but a few ounces and through which, in the words of William Blake, you “hold infinity in the palm of your hand”: a humble pinecone. Worth nothing, neither rare nor unusual, it is like the Dao itself, failing to catch the eye or interest; to most, its meaning remains unseen. Yet to those who know what they are beholding, it is nothing less than a marvel. In the pinecone is a visible reminder of a practical discipline, the tenacious, unyielding pursuit of intermediate means as strategic advantage for achieving the ultimate ends—a quest only possible for those who dare to take the roundabout route.

It is said that during Napoleon’s Austrian campaign his army advanced to within six miles of the town of Feldkirch. It looked as though his men would take it without resistance. But as Napoleon’s army advanced toward their objective in the night, the Christians of Feldkirch gathered in their little church to pray. It was Easter eve. The next morning at sunrise, the bells of the village pealed out across the countryside. Napoleon’s army, not realizing it was Easter Sunday, thought that in the night the Austrian army had moved into Feldkirch and the bells were ringing in jubilation. Napoleon ordered a retreat, and the battle at Feldkirch never took place. The Easter bells caused the enemy to flee, and peace reigned in the Austrian countryside.

As Jefferson wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey: “The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” In the age of our Founders, this human impulse to demand the right of co-creating shared wisdom accounted for the ferocity with which the states demanded protection for free access to the printing press, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. General George Washington, in a speech to officers of the army in 1783, said, “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” But the twentieth century brought its own bitter lessons. The new and incredibly powerful electronic media that began to replace the printing press—first radio and film and then television—were used to indoctrinate millions of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, and others with elaborate abstract ideologies that made many of them deaf, blind, and numb to the systematic leading of tens of millions of their fellow human beings “to the slaughter.

This homeostatic hypothesis effectively vanished from the mainstream thinking on human (as opposed to animal) obesity with the coming of World War II. The war destroyed the German and Austrian community of clinical investigators, who had done the most perceptive thinking about the causes of obesity and had a tradition of rigorous scientific research dating back two hundred years.

History, it is said, is written by the victors. In the late 1920s, Hayek claimed that monetary policy had taken the wrong course and predicted a deflationary bust. Irving Fisher, on the other hand, saw nothing wrong at the time with either America’s economy or its monetary policy, famously opining in the summer of 1929 that US stocks had reached a ‘permanently high plateau’. If accuracy of prediction is what matters for economic theory, as Milton Friedman later claimed, then Hayek’s interpretation should have become the received wisdom of his profession. Yet the Austrian’s interpretation of the 1920s and its aftermath has been more or less air-brushed from the history books, while Fisher’s monetarist view has become received wisdom.

Stoicism spoke to Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist who survived the Nazi slave labor camps as a prisoner at Dachau. From his observation of exemplary prisoners who maintained their dignity and goodwill even in those hellish circumstances, Frankl concluded that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” of meeting whatever life presents. This same philosophy has spoken to generations of alcoholics seeking to be free of an enslaving addiction. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” their prayer goes, “courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

With those teachings, though, von List blended popular notions about the superiority of the white race and of Germanic peoples in particular. From his work sprang a movement that called itself Ariosophy- "the wisdom of the Aryans"-that borrowed heavily from Theosophy but reworked it to support an agenda of pan-German racism. In the years before his death in 1919, von List proclaimed that a mighty leader, "the Strong One from Above," would soon arise and unite the Germanic peoples. He was, of course, quite correct; the year he died, an Austrian veteran named Adolf Hitler, who was strongly influenced by Ariosophy, began his political career.

Long after Rockefeller had exited the industrial scene, various economists, while espousing the general superiority of competition, conceded the economic wisdom of trusts under certain conditions. The conservative, Austrian-born economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, for example, contended that monopolies might prove beneficial during depressions or in new, rapidly shifting industries. By replacing turmoil with stability, a monopoly “may make fortresses out of what otherwise might be centers of devastation” and “in the end produce not only steadier but also greater expansion of total output than could be secured by an entirely uncontrolled onward rush that cannot fail to be studded with catastrophes.” Schumpeter imagined that entrepreneurs wouldn’t commit large sums to risky ventures if the future seemed cloudy and new competitors could easily spoil their plans. “On the one hand, largest-scale plans could in many cases not materialize at all if it were not known from the outset that competition will be discouraged by heavy capital requirements or lack of experience, or that means are available to discourage or checkmate it so as to gain the time and space for further developments.