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Max Frisch Quotes

Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1986. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. May 1911 – 4. April 1991  •  Other names Макс Фриш, ماکس فریش
Max Frisch photo

Works

Montauk
Montauk
Max Frisch
Gantenbein
Max Frisch
Homo Faber
Homo Faber
Max Frisch
Montauk
Montauk
Max Frisch
Gantenbein
Max Frisch
Homo Faber
Homo Faber
Max Frisch
Max Frisch: 67 quotes4 likes

Famous Max Frisch Quotes

“Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”

Max Frisch book Homo Faber

Source: Homo Faber (1957)

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

Max Frisch

“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.”

Max Frisch

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1966-1977

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

Max Frisch

Max Frisch Quotes about people

“We were calling for manpower and people came.”

Max Frisch

Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kamen Menschen.
Articles

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

Max Frisch

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1966-1977

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

Max Frisch

Drafts for a Third Sketchbook (2013)

“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”

Max Frisch book Gantenbein

Gantenbein (1964)

“Cause and effect are never divided between two people”

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

Max Frisch Quotes about life

“That a plot has no real life of it's own; it exists only in it's precipitates. It cannot be distilled but only crystallized- in which form it is then immutable, whether successful or unsuccesful: once and for all”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

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

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

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

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

Max Frisch: Trending quotes

“Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.”

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

“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.”

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

“Time does not change us it just unfolds us”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

Max Frisch Quotes

“My reality doesn't lie in the part I play, but in the unconscious decision as to what kind of part I assign to myself.”

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

“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.”

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch book Gantenbein

Gantenbein (1964)

“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”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“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…”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Drafts for a Third Sketchbook (2013)

“Everything that is human looks like a special case”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“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.”

Max Frisch

Wer sich nicht mit Politik befaßt, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen möchte, bereits vollzogen: er dient der herrschenden Partei.
Sketchbook 1946-1949

“Do you know what you need?”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1966-1977

“Uniforms ruin every character”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“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…”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“What hope have you know given up?”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1966-1977

“Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.”

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

“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”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch book Gantenbein

Gantenbein faking to his lover he is blind
Gantenbein (1964)

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

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

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

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

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

“To write is to read one's own self”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“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?”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1966-1977

“Are you friend with yourself?”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1966-1977

“…for no rational reason.”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1966-1977

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

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

“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.”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch

Drafts for a Third Sketchbook (2013)

“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”

Max Frisch

Sketchbook 1946-1949

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

Max Frisch book Gantenbein

Gantenbein (1964)

“The horror of uncreative solitude…..”

Max Frisch

I'm not Stiller (1955)

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

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

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

Max Frisch book Gantenbein

Gantenbein (1964)

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