Max Frisch citations

Page 2

“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”

“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”

“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”

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

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

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

“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.”