Max Frisch citations

“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?”

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

“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”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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”

“We were calling for manpower and people came.”

“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…”

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

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

“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”

“Cause and effect are never divided between two people”

“Uniforms ruin every character”