Max Frisch Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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.

Max Frisch
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.

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

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

Max Frisch
Technology…the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.

Max Frisch
The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else.

Max Frisch
To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us

Max Frisch
Your virtuous living is your enemy's best and cheapest weapon

Max Frisch
If on some occasion I happen to read something in it — because, for instance, I need to know a date — I am always disconcerted to find that two or five years ago I came to exactly the same conclusion, only to forget it because I had not succeed in living up to it; in fact, I had tenaciously been doing the very opposite.

Max Frisch
The selfknowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life.

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
We were calling for manpower and people came.

Max Frisch
Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offence.

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

Max Frisch
Overcoming prejudice: the only possible way through love, which creates no graven images.

Max Frisch
It is a sign of non love that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of ones neighbors.

Max Frisch
Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

Max Frisch
Why there are so many great actresses, so few great woman writers? The erotic urge that lies at the bottom of all art has a feminine and a masculine character. Feminine is the urge to be; masculine the urge to do. Interpretative art always has more of the feminine about it

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

Max Frisch
What makes Shakespeare so overwhelming is the way in which the situation (who is confronting whom) is usually itself part of the composition, meaningful already as a situation

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

Max Frisch
We nest in an accident whose precarious valance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us

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

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

Max Frisch