Top 82 Frisch Quotes
#1. I will have nothing to do with a bomb! [Response to being invited (1943) to work with Otto Robert Frisch and some British scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.]
Lise Meitner
#2. I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.
Max Frisch
#3. There's nothing tough about playing Third. All a guy needs is a strong arm and a strong chest.
Frankie Frisch
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I received my doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1910.
Karl Von Frisch
#9. The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite.
Karl Von Frisch
#10. 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
#11. The older you get the simpler you want to make it.
Max Frisch
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language.
Max Frisch
#15. Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.
Max Frisch
#16. 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
#17. The bee's life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water
Karl Von Frisch
#18. Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
Max Frisch
#19. Nature has unlimited time in which to travel along tortuous paths to an unknown destination. The mind of man is too feeble to discern whence or whither the path runs and has to be content if it can discern only portions of the track, however small.
Karl Von Frisch
#20. You can put anything into words, except your own life
Max Frisch
#21. Jealousy is the fear of comparison.
Max Frisch
#24. 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
#25. Baseball is like this. Have one good year and you can fool them for five more, because for five more
years they expect you to have another good one.
Frankie Frisch
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.
Max Frisch
#30. Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
Max Frisch
#31. Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge.
Max Frisch
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. There is no such thing, as far as I'm concerned, as ownership in love.
Max Frisch
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. there are some problems no Unix command can address.
Aeleen Frisch
#40. A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light.
Ragnar Frisch
#41. I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine.
Karl Von Frisch
#42. A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.
Max Frisch
#43. If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.
Max Frisch
#44. I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.
Max Frisch
#45. -only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.
Max Frisch
#46. Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.
Max Frisch
#47. It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.
Max Frisch
#48. The point is to show who is the cross and who the crucified.
Max Frisch
#49. I live, like every real man, in my work.
Max Frisch
#50. It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.
Max Frisch
#51. Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.
Max Frisch
#52. You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments!
Niels Bohr
#53. Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight.
Max Frisch
#54. Any econometrician who wants to see practical application of his science will be highly concerned with applications to economic planning at the national level.
Ragnar Frisch
#55. When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.
Max Frisch
#56. If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill!
Max Frisch
#57. Cause and effect are never divided between two people.
Max Frisch
#59. I know that I'm the happiest of lovers ...
Max Frisch
#60. To write is to read one's own self
Max Frisch
#61. Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.
Max Frisch
#62. 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
#63. I have been a Professor Emeritus since 1958, and have continued my scientific studies.
Karl Von Frisch
#64. We asked for workers. We got people instead.
Max Frisch
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The dignity of man is in free choice.
Max Frisch
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us
Max Frisch
#72. You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely
Max Frisch
#73. After the first exams, I switched to the Faculty of Philosophy and studied Zoology in Munich and Vienna.
Karl Von Frisch
#74. I think managing shortened my playing career, but I was a better manager when I was playing, when I could lead like a platoon sergeant in the field rather than as a general sitting back on his duff in a command post.
Frankie Frisch
#75. It is remarkable that the persons we love most are those we can least describe.
Max Frisch
#76. Today we no longer ask what really goes on in an atom; we ask what is likely to be observed-and with what likelihood-when we subject atoms to any specified influences such as light or heat, magnetic fields or electric currents.
Otto Robert Frisch
#77. Deep in the human nature, there is an almost irresistible tendency to concentrate physical and mental energy on attempts at solving problems that seem to be unsolvable. Indeed, for some kinds of active people, only the seemingly unsolvable problems can arouse their interest.
Ragnar Frisch
#78. Why do dying people never shed tears?
Max Frisch
#79. 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
#80. Our comparative fidelity was fear of defeat at the hands of another partner.
Max Frisch
#81. All that remains is the mad desire for present identity through a woman.
Max Frisch
#82. 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
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