Max Frisch Quotes

Travelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic.

If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.

Why don't we follow our yearning?

Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.

As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna,is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed.

Our comparative fidelity was fear of defeat at the hands of another partner.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine istheir uglinesstheir pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin, ... the world as an Americanized vacuumtheir fake health, their fake youthfulnessthe way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.

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.

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

Thou shalt not, it is said, make unto thee any graven image of God. The same commandment should apply when God is taken to mean the living part of every human being, the part that cannot be grasped. It is a sin that, however much it is committed against us, we almost continually commit ourselves
Except when we love.

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.

Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

And it's just the same with the inner life of man. Anyone can know about it nowadays. How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don't know my murderous impulses through C. G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Proust, Spain through Hemingway, Paris through Ernst Jünger, Switzerland through Mark Twain, Mexico through Graham Greene, my fear of death through Bernanos, inability ever to reach my destination through Kafka, and all sorts of other things through Thomas Mann? It's true, you need never have read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends, who also live all their experiences second-hand.

In actual fact those who do not care for politics and sit on the fence do indeed side for a political party: The ruling party.

Jealousy is the fear of comparison.

When you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?

The demand that we love our neighbor as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created.

You can put anything into words, except your own life

A real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive ... It's difficult to say what makes a life a real life ... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself.

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

Cause and effect are never divided between two people.

It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans.

It is conceivable at least that a late generation, such as we presumably are, has particular need of the sketch, in order not to be strangled to death by inherited conceptions which preclude new births ... The sketch has direction, but no ending; the sketch as reflection of a view of life that is no longer conclusive, or is not yet conclusive.

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

If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill!

A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.

It is remarkable that the persons we love most are those we can least describe.

Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable.
But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.
Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth

We asked for workers. We got people instead.

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

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

I don't deny that it was more than a coincidence which made things turn out as they did, it was a whole train of coincidences. But what has providence to do with it? I don't need any mystical explanation for the occurrence of the improbable; mathematics explains it adequately, as far as I'm concerned.

Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the one will come up approximately 1,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable. But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.

We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature ... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle.

Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are ...

We know that every person who is loved feels transformed, unfolded, and he unfolds everything, the most intimate as well as the most familiar, to the one who loves him as well as to himself ... The person one loves is as ungraspable as the universe, as God's infinite space, he is boundless, full of possibilities, full of secrets.

The machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.

Perhaps there are only a few women who experience without deception the overwhelming intoxication of the senses which they expectfrom their encounters with men, which they feel bound to expect because of the fuss made about it in novels, written by men.

I live, like every real man, in my work.

The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory.

Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge.

There is no such thing, as far as I'm concerned, as ownership in love.

Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.

I've often wondered what people mean when they talk about an experience. I'm a technologist and accustomed to seeing things as they are. I see everything they are talking about very clearly; after all, I'm not blind. I see the moon over the Tamaulipas desert--it is more distinct than at other times, perhaps, but still a calculable mass circling around our planet, an example of gravitation, interesting, but in what way an experience? I see the jagged rocks, standing out black against the moonlight; perhaps they do look like the jagged backs of prehistoric monsters, but I know they are rocks, stone, probably volcanic, one should have to examine them to be sure of this. Why should I feel afraid? There aren't any prehistoric monsters any more. Why should I imagine them? I'm sorry, but I don't see any stone angels either; nor demons; I see what I see--the usual shapes due to erosion and also my long shadow on the sand, but no ghosts. Why get womanish? I don't see any Flood either, but sand lit up by the moon and made undulating, like water, by the wind, which doesn't surprise me; I don't find it fantastic, but perfectly explicable. I don't know what the souls of the damned look like; perhaps like black agaves in the desert at night. What I see are agaves, a plant that blossoms once only and dies. Furthermore, I know (however I may look at the moment) that I am not the last or the first man on earth; and I can't be moved by the mere idea that I am the last man, because it isn't tru

It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.

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