Max Frisch Quotes

“It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”

“A joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment… But the best camouflage of all - in my opinion - is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it.”

“How much frankness can we stand in a friend?”

“You can put anything into words, except your own life”

“When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.”

“We asked for workers. We got people instead.”

“I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.”

“The dead are difficult because they´ve never known the people I´m involved with today”

“He knows that every piece of selfknowledge which one cannot keep to oneself makes one smaller and smaller, he knows that he who cannot keep silent his wishes to be recognized in the greatness of his selfknowledge which is no selfknowledge if it cannot be kept silent, and one becomes hypersensitive one feels betrayed because one wants to be recognized by people, one becomes ridiculous ambitious in inverse ratio to ones selfknowledge”

“Cause and effect are never divided between two people”

“The renunciation of recognition will never become possible without a certitude that our life is directed by a suprahuman authority.”

“The selfknowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life.”

“Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing.”

“A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.”

“Time does not change us it just unfolds us”

“If on some occasion I happen to read something in it — because, for instance, I neet to know a date — I am always disconcerted to find that two or five years ago I came to exactly the same conclusion, only to forget it because I had not succeded in living up to it; in fact, I had tenaciously been doing the very opposite.”

“Your virtuous living is your enemy's best and cheapest weapon”

“It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that makes them a couple”

“You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself”

“Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?”

“Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel…”

“Basically America (the USA) is not a warmongering but simply a commercial society: war as the continuation of business by other means.”

“Everything that is human looks like a special case”

“What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive.”

“To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us”

“(Present) it is a culture that strictly ignores present obligations and places itself entirely at the service of eternity”

“A person who does not concern himself with politics has already made the political choice he was so anxious to spare himself: he is serving the ruling party.”

“Do you know what you need?”

“How can we ever judge a human being when he is and he will always be another person”

“Uniforms ruin every character”

“A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity…”

“What hope have you know given up?”

“Where the works gives scope for individuality, one sees a blossoming of self respect”

“Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.”

“What makes Shakespeare so overwhelming is the way in which the situation (who is confronting whom) is usually itself part of the composition, meaningful already as a situation”

“I know that I'm the happiest of lovers…”

“Carrying on with the conversation like a woman when the bill comes…”

“Theatrical effectiveness, I believe, lies in it's rarity its uniqueness”

“You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely.”

“One can be resolved to promote good, or one can be resolved to be a good person- Two separate things that are mutually exclusive”

“We nest in an accident whose precarious valance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us”

“Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance.”

“Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight”

“Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous”

“The monstruous paradox that people come closer to one another without words”

“You can lose a woman when you have won her.”

“Overcoming prejudice: the only possible way through love, which creates no graven images.”

“You merely had an affair with me, to be exact, and therefore no right to prevent me from another affair.”

“How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses.”

“To write is to read one's own self”

“People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?”

“The older you get the simpler you want to make it.”

“Are you friend with yourself?”

“…for no rational reason.”

“It is a sign of non love that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of ones neighbors.”

“The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else.”

“THANATOS AND EROS
the American for that is:
CASUAL SEX.”

“Why there are so many great actresses, so few great woman writers? The erotic urge that lies at the bottom of all art has a feminine and a masculine character. Feminine is the urge to be; masculine the urge to do. Interpretative art always has more of the feminine about it”

“Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful.”

“The horror of uncreative solitude…..”

“There are moments when her voice is all he needs.”

“They wanted what is possible only once: the now.”