Max Frisch

How can we ever judge a human being when he is and he will always be another person

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?

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...

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

The self knowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life.

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

...for no rational reason.

How much frankness can we stand in a friend?

Basically America (the USA) is not a warmongering but simply a commercial society: war as the continuation of business by other means.

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

Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.

Do you know what you need?

The renunciation of recognition will never become possible without a certitude that our life is directed by a suprahuman authority.

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...

Everything that is human looks like a special case