Top 64 Max Frisch Quotes
#1. When thou shewest Respect to any one, see that thy Submissions be proportionable to the Homage thou owest him. There is Stupidity and Pride in doing too little; but in over acting of it, there is Abjection and Hypocrisy.
Max Frisch
#2. Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.
Max Frisch
#4. I know that I'm the happiest of lovers ...
Max Frisch
#6. Cause and effect are never divided between two people.
Max Frisch
#7. If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill!
Max Frisch
#8. When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.
Max Frisch
#9. If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.
Max Frisch
#10. Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.
Max Frisch
#11. It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.
Max Frisch
#12. I live, like every real man, in my work.
Max Frisch
#13. The point is to show who is the cross and who the crucified.
Max Frisch
#14. It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.
Max Frisch
#15. Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.
Max Frisch
#16. -only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.
Max Frisch
#17. I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.
Max Frisch
#18. Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight.
Max Frisch
#19. The technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living.
Max Frisch
#20. All that remains is the mad desire for present identity through a woman.
Max Frisch
#21. Our comparative fidelity was fear of defeat at the hands of another partner.
Max Frisch
#22. 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
#23. Why do dying people never shed tears?
Max Frisch
#24. It is remarkable that the persons we love most are those we can least describe.
Max Frisch
#25. You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely
Max Frisch
#27. To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us
Max Frisch
#28. Stillertook part in the Spanish Civil WarIt is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined
a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.
Max Frisch
#29. Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body
we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!
Max Frisch
#30. The dignity of man is in free choice.
Max Frisch
#31. 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.
Max Frisch
#32. Sabeth listened when I told her about my experiences, but as one listens to an old man; without interrupting, politely, without believing, without getting excited.
Max Frisch
#33. We asked for workers. We got people instead.
Max Frisch
#34. 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.
Max Frisch
#35. Jealousy is the fear of comparison.
Max Frisch
#36. You can put anything into words, except your own life
Max Frisch
#37. Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
Max Frisch
#38. 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
#39. Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.
Max Frisch
#40. The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language.
Max Frisch
#41. 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?
Max Frisch
#42. 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.
Max Frisch
#43. The older you get the simpler you want to make it.
Max Frisch
#44. 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.
Max Frisch
#45. 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.
Max Frisch
#46. We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes
or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.
Max Frisch
#48. 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.
Max Frisch
#49. I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.
Max Frisch
#50. A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.
Max Frisch
#51. There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that's something no police in the world can spot.
Max Frisch
#52. Technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance, ... the technologist's worldlessness ... My mistake lay in the factthat we technologists try to live without death.
Max Frisch
#53. There is no such thing, as far as I'm concerned, as ownership in love.
Max Frisch
#54. 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.
Max Frisch
#55. I took the standpoint that the profession of technologist, a man who masters matter, is a masculine profession, if not the only masculine profession there is.
Max Frisch
#57. 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.
Max Frisch
#58. Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge.
Max Frisch
#59. Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
Max Frisch
#60. Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.
Max Frisch
#61. 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
#62. If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line.
[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]
Max Frisch
#63. 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.
Max Frisch
#64. The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt, and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.
Max Frisch
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