Max Frisch > Quotes

“Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”
― Max Frisch

“We asked for workers. We got people instead.”
― Max Frisch

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

“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

“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, I'm Not Stiller

“You can put anything into words, except your own life”
― Max Frisch

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

“Freunde müssen einander verstehen um Freunde zu bleiben. Brüder sind immer Brüder.”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“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

“Es ist bemerkenswert, dass wir gerade von dem Menschen, den wir lieben, am mindesten aussagen können, wie er sei. ”
― Max Frisch

“I called her a sentimentalist and artsy-craftsy. She called me Homo Faber.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“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 true. Why get hysterical? Mountains are mountains, even if in a certain light they may look like something else, but it is the Sierra Madre Oriental, and we are not standing in a kingdom of the dead, but in the Tamaulipas desert, Mexico, about sixty miles from the nearest road, which is unpleasant, but in what way an experience? Nor can I bring myself to hear something resembling eternity; I don't hear anything, apart from the trickle of sand at every step. Why should I experience what isn't there?”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“Die beste und sicherste Tarnung ist immer noch die blanke und nackte Wahrheit. Komischerweise die glaubt niemand.”
― Max Frisch

“Wer sich nicht mit Politik befasst, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen wollte, bereits vollzogen.”
― Max Frisch

“Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don't want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn't always fun, you can't always be in form. Moreover, I have learned from experience that once you are not in form women don't remain in form either; as soon as they are bored they start complaining you've no feeling.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.”
― Max Frisch, Montauk

“Everything happened exactly as I had intended it shouldn’t.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“She thought it stupid of a woman to want to be understood by a man; the man (said Hanna) wants the woman to be a mystery, so that he can be inspired and excited by his own incomprehension.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“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, I'm Not Stiller

“Ich bin nicht Stiller!”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“Wer sich nicht mit Politik befaßt, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen möchte, bereits vollzogen: er dient der herrschenden Partei.”
― Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1946–1949

“Ich kann es nicht ausstehen, wenn man mir sagt, was ich zu empfinden habe; dann komme ich mir, obschon ich sehe, wovon die Rede ist, wie ein Blinder vor.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“Wieso seid ihr stärker als die Wahrheit”
― Max Frisch, Andorra

“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, Montauk

“-only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.”
― Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene

“Es gibt allerlei Arten, einen Menschen zu morden oder wenigstens seine Seele, und das merkt keine Polizei der Welt. Dann genügt ein Wort, eine Offenheit im rechten Augenblick. Dann genügt ein Lächeln. Ich möchte den Menschen sehen, der nicht durch Lächeln umzubringen ist oder durch Schweigen.”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“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...”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“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, Homo Faber

“Scherz ist die drittbeste Tarnung. Die zweitbeste: Sentimentalität. Aber die beste und sicherste Tarnung ist immer noch die blanke und nackte Wahrheit. Komischerweise. Die glaubt niemand.”
― Max Frisch, Biedermann und die Brandstifter