Max Frisch Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

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
People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?

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

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

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
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
Carrying on with the conversation like a woman when the bill comes...

Max Frisch
He knows that every piece of self-knowledge which one cannot keep to oneself makes one smaller and smaller, he knows that he who cannot keep silent his wishes to be recognized in the greatness of his self-knowledge which is no self-knowledge if it cannot be kept silent, and one becomes hypersensitive one feels betrayed because one wants to be recognized by people, one becomes ridiculous ambitious in inverse ratio to ones self-knowledge.

Max Frisch
[Present] is a culture that strictly ignores present obligations and places itself entirely at the service of eternity

Max Frisch
You merely had an affair with me, to be exact, and therefore no right to prevent me from another affair.'

Max Frisch
Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous

Max Frisch
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
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
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
That a plot has no real life of it's own; it exists only in it's precipitates. It cannot be distilled but only crystallized- in which form it is then immutable, whether successful or unsuccesful: once and for all

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

Max Frisch
Cause and effect are never divided between two people

Max Frisch
Only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.

Max Frisch
How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses.

Max Frisch
You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself

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
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.

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