Max Frisch Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

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

Max Frisch
The monstruous paradox that people come closer to one another without words

Max Frisch
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.

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

Max Frisch
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.

Max Frisch
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
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
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
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
A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity...

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

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

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

Max Frisch
When you love someone you leave every possibility open to them, and in spite of all the memories of the past you are ready to be surprised, again and again surprised, at how different they are, how various, not a finished image.

Max Frisch
Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?

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

Max Frisch
Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance.

Max Frisch
Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing.

Max Frisch
What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive.

Max Frisch
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
Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel...

Max Frisch
Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful.

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

Max Frisch
Where the works gives scope for individuality, one sees a blossoming of self respect

Max Frisch
Chorus Leader: He who, in order to know
What danger threatens, reads papers,
Each day at breakfast indignant
Over some distant disaster,
Each day given explanations
That spare him the need to think,
Each day informed of what happened the day before,
He finds it hard to perceive what is happening now
Beneath his own roof—
Chorus: Unpublished!

Max Frisch
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
Theatrical effectiveness, I believe, lies in it's rarity its uniqueness

Max Frisch