Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Kraus

Language, Kraus insists, is not a transparent tool but a creature with teeth. The line flips the usual promise of precision: stare hard enough at a word and it doesn’t resolve into clarity, it recedes. What looks like a call for careful reading is also a warning about the limits of scrutiny. Under the microscope, “word” stops behaving like a label and starts behaving like a history: connotations, clichés, hidden politics, the sediment of past uses. You don’t get closer to meaning; you discover how much meaning has been outsourced to habit.

The intent is characteristically Krausian: to shame the lazy confidence of public language. Kraus made a career in Vienna skewering journalism, bourgeois hypocrisy, and the way slogans and respectable phrases anesthetize moral attention. In that context, the “distance” isn’t mystical; it’s civic. The more rigorously you examine the diction of a headline, a speech, a patriotic formula, the more you notice the evasions built into it - the passive voice that hides an agent, the euphemism that launders violence, the abstraction that turns suffering into “necessity.”

Subtext: the word “looks back” because it implicates you. Close reading isn’t just analysis; it’s confrontation. If language is compromised, the reader is, too - since our identities and loyalties are partly made of borrowed phrases. Kraus turns philology into ethics: precision doesn’t merely reveal meaning, it reveals complicity.