Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Kraus

Creativity, Kraus suggests, is less a lightning bolt than a sting of recognition: the moment you think youve invented something new and realize youre secretly reusing your own mind. The line is a typically Krausian jab at the cult of originality, delivered with the dry paradox he weaponized against Viennese modernitys self-congratulating rhetoric. If you catch yourself "plagiarizing" yourself, the idea is "legitimate" not because its unprecedented, but because it has the unmistakable signature of inner necessity. It feels inevitable, as if it existed before you wrote it.

The joke cuts both ways. On one hand, it flatters the serious writer: true ideas recur, return, demand restatement across years and forms. On the other, it mocks the pretension of novelty and the marketplace that rewards fresh packaging over honest thinking. Kraus spent his career in The Fackel skewering journalism, political cant, and the recycled phrases of public life; here he draws a hard line between dead repetition (the mass medias borrowed language) and living repetition (the artists recurring obsessions). Self-plagiarism becomes a strange moral alibi: if youre stealing, at least youre stealing from the only source that cant be faked.

The subtext is almost combative: stop chasing originality as a badge. Measure your work by whether it loops back to a core insight you cant escape. In a culture addicted to newness, Kraus treats recurrence as proof of authenticity, and turns a writers private embarrassment into a standard of truth.