Robert Walser > Quotes

“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“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, The Tanners

“Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“One is always half mad when one is shy of people.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“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, Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser

“How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present”
― Robert Walser, The Tanners

“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, Masquerade and Other Stories

“Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway!
...
You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“How uninteresting interesting things can become.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.”
― Robert Walser

“Houses, gardens, and people were transfigured into musical sounds, all that was solid seemed to be transfigured into soul and into gentleness. Sweet veils of silver and soul-haze swam through all things and lay over all things. The soul of the world had opened, and all grief, all human disappointment, all evil, all pain seemed to vanish, from now on never to appear again. Earlier walks came before my eyes; but the wonderful image of the humble present became a feeling which overpowered all others. The future paled, and the past dissolved. I glowed and flowered myself in the glowing, flowering present. From near and far, great things and small things emerged bright silver with marvelous gestures, joys, and enrichments, and in the midst of this beautiful place I dreamed of nothing but this place itself. All other fantasies sank and vanished in meaninglessness. I had the whole rich earth immediately before me, and I still looked only at what was most small and most humble. With gestures of love the heavens rose and fell. I had become an inward being, and walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the fabulous depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also. I was no longer myself, was another, and yet it was on this account that I became properly myself. In the sweet light of love I realized, or believe I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“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

“With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“make yourself invisible, or get busy with something.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“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

“We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“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, Masquerade and Other Stories

“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, Jakob von Gunten

“I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“Often I walked in the neighboring forest of fir and pine, whose beauties, wonderful winter solitudes, seemed to protect me from the onset of despair. Ineffably kind voices spoke down to me from the trees: 'You must not come to the hard conclusion that everything in the world is hard, false, and wicked. But come often to us; the forest likes you. In its company you will find health and good spirits again, and entertain more lofty and beautiful thoughts.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)”
― Robert Walser

“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

“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, Masquerade and Other Stories

“I wanted to speak with someone, but found no time; sought some fixed point, but found none. In the midst of the unrelenting forward thrust I felt the wish to stand still. The muchness and the motion were too much and too fast. Everyone withdrew from everyone. There was a running, as of something liquefied, a constant going forth, as of evaporation. Everything was schematic, ghostlike, even myself.”
― Robert Walser

“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, The Walk and Other Stories

“This is freedom,’ said the instructress, ‘it’s something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away. Now you can watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes…”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“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, The Walk and Other Stories

“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