Top 64 Robert Walser Quotes
#1. He gave such a vulnerable impression. He resembled the leaf that a little boy strikes down from its branch with a stick, because its singularity makes it conspicuous.
Robert Walser
#2. Wallets can establish connections and change opinions. Things that fall apart can be glued back by money with astonishing alacrity.
Robert Walser
#3. A park like this resembles a large, silent, isolated room. In fact it's always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it's always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child.
Robert Walser
#4. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.
Robert Walser
#5. Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.
Robert Walser
#6. Perhaps there were a few repetitions here and there. But I would like to confess that I consider nature and human life to be a lovely and charming flow of fleeting repetitions, and I would like further to confess that I regard this phenomenon as a beauty and a blessing.
Robert Walser
#7. So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)
Robert Walser
#8. I feel how little it concerns me, everything that's called "the world," and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.
Robert Walser
#9. He was one of those people who feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them.
Robert Walser
#10. What we understand and love understands and loves us also.
Robert Walser
#11. That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.
Robert Walser
#12. Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another's loneliness strange.
Robert Walser
#13. Let us see to it that ponderers, thinkers, feelers survive in our midst.
Robert Walser
#14. I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.
Robert Walser
#15. One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.
Robert Walser
#16. Money rules the world, and doubtless also, here and there, the bit of love within it, and when love turns to hate, one remembers unpaid board.
Robert Walser
#17. And the pine trees that smell so wonderfully of spicy power. Shall I never see a mountain pine again? Really that would be no misfortune. To forgo something: that also has its fragrance and its power.
Robert Walser
#18. Make yourself invisible, or get busy with something.
Robert Walser
#19. Naturally I am of the deeply felt conviction that it is quite nice, quite lovely to be capable of enthusiam.
Robert Walser
#20. A girl sitting with us in the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end.
Robert Walser
#21. I imagine that it would be unspeakably lovely to die with the terrible knowledge that I have offended whosoever I love the most and have filled them with bad opinions of me.
Robert Walser
#22. You must hope and yet hope for nothing. Look up to something, yes, do that, because that is right for you, you're young, terribly young, Jakob, but always admit to yourself that you despise it, the thing that you're looking up to with respect.
Robert Walser
#23. It is a very painful thing, having to part company with what torments you. And how mute the world is!
Robert Walser
#24. At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.
Robert Walser
#25. I contemplated pride and love. All this contemplativeness. When will I be free of it?
Robert Walser
#26. It doesn't take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise God, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave.
Robert Walser
#27. We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.
Robert Walser
#28. Wherever there are children, there will always be injustice.
Robert Walser
#29. I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.
Robert Walser
#30. Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls
Robert Walser
#31. One is always half mad when one is shy of people.
Robert Walser
#32. Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.
Robert Walser
#33. [ ... ] there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.
Robert Walser
#35. With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.
Robert Walser
#36. At last I have drawn a firm line under the truly astounding great column of figures and am done with pursuing that for which I am not sufficiently intelligent.
Robert Walser
#37. In fact, I love all repose and all that reposes, all thrift and moderation, and am in my inmost self, unfriendly toward any haste and agitation.
Robert Walser
#38. How uninteresting interesting things can become.
Robert Walser
#39. I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.
Robert Walser
#40. Ah, all these thoughts, all this peculiar yearning, this seeking, this stretching out of hands toward a meaning. Let it all dream, let it all sleep. I'll simply let it come. Let it come.
Robert Walser
#41. The soul of the world had opened and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing and painful was on the point of vanishing ... all notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present, I myself glowed.
Robert Walser
#42. Questions are usually more beautiful, more significant than their resolutions, which in fact never resolve them, are never sufficient to satisfy us, whereas from a question streams a wonderful fragrance.
Robert Walser
#43. Something feels like it's missing when I haven't heard any music, and when I hear music, then I really feel like something is missing. That's the best I can do in trying to describe music.
Robert Walser
#44. Mysteries make one dream of unendurable bewitchments, they have the fragrance of something quite, quite unspeakably beautiful.
Robert Walser
#45. When we realize that words can destroy something good, wonderful, and dear, and that by keeping silent we can avoid causing the least damage or harm, it's easy to stay silent.
Robert Walser
#46. I already said loud and clear that today I'm apparently a little hmm hmm and la-di-da and okay a bit hoo-hoo and maybe also a little wee-oo wee-oo. Is that so terrible?
Robert Walser
#48. If a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favoured me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.
Robert Walser
#49. Walk,' was my answer, 'I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world ... Without walking, I would be dead.
Robert Walser
#50. Wherever poesie can be felt, all poetic touches are superfluous.
Robert Walser
#52. I know this perfectly well, but it was precisely this that I liked - her thinking me silly. Such a peculiar vice: to be secretly pleased to be allowed to observe that one is being slightly robbed.
Robert Walser
#53. Failure's sleeve cannot help but brush against the back of gratified desires and insatiability is inevitably left to gaze with smoldering eyes into the wise, peaceful eyes of a person who finds satiation within himself.
Robert Walser
#54. I would wish it on no one to be me.
Only I am capable of being myself.
To know so much, to have seen so much, and
To say nothing, just about nothing.
Robert Walser
#55. Exceptional estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excrutiating.
Robert Walser
#56. To the devil with every miserable desire to seem more than one is
Robert Walser
#57. To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.
Robert Walser
#58. Artists, as a rule, understand nothing about business, or, for some reason or other, they aren't allowed to understand anything about it.
Robert Walser
#59. I had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible.
Robert Walser
#60. The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad.
Robert Walser
#61. On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.
Robert Walser
#62. Listening to music, I always have exactly the same feeling: something's missing. Never will I learn the cause of this gentle sadness, never will I wish to investigate it.
Robert Walser
#63. How small life is here
and how big nothingness.
The sky, tired of light,
has given everything to the snow.
The two trees bow
their heads to each other.
Clouds cross the world's
silence in a circle dance
Robert Walser
#64. That's what's so miraculous about the city: each person's bearing and behavior vanish among these thousand sorts, observations are fleeting, judgements swift, and forgetting inevitable.
Robert Walser
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