Max frisch quotes

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.

I know that I'm the happiest of lovers.

There is no art without Eros.

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

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.

We know that every person who is loved feels transformed, unfolded, and he unfolds everything, the most intimate as well as the most familiar, to the one who loves him as well as to himself.... The person one loves is as ungraspable as the universe, as God's infinite space, he is boundless, full of possibilities, full of secrets.

Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge.

Our comparative fidelity was fear of defeat at the hands of another partner.

Why do dying people never shed tears?

Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

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.

The point is to show who is the cross and who the crucified.

Cause and effect are never divided between two people.

A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.

You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely

I have no words for my reality.

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.

Thou shalt not, it is said, make unto thee any graven image of God. The same commandment should apply when God is taken to mean the living part of every human being, the part that cannot be grasped. It is a sin that, however much it is committed against us, we almost continually commit ourselves--Except when we love.

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?

It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is conceivable at least that a late generation, such as we presumably are, has particular need of the sketch, in order not to be strangled to death by inherited conceptions which preclude new births.... The sketch has direction, but no ending; the sketch as reflection of a view of life that is no longer conclusive, or is not yet conclusive.

Why don't we follow our yearning?

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.

Every uniform corrupts one's character.

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

My greatest fear: repetition.

I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.

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.

There is no such thing, as far as I'm concerned, as ownership in love.

You can put anything into words, except your own life.

We asked for workers. We got people instead.

All that remains is the mad desire for present identity through a woman.

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.

The dignity of man is in free choice.

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.

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.

Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.

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!

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.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.

Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.

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.

The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language.

Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight.

I live, like every real man, in my work.

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.

If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.

The older you get the simpler you want to make it.

Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.

If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill!

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.

Jealousy is the fear of comparison.

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

THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine istheir uglinesstheir pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin,... the world as an Americanized vacuumtheir fake health, their fake youthfulnessthe way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.