Max Frisch Quotes

You can lose a woman when you have won her.

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

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

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?

The horror of uncreative solitude.....

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

(Present) it is a culture that strictly ignores present obligations and places itself entirely at the service of eternity

He knows that every piece of selfknowledge 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 selfknowledge which is no selfknowledge 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 selfknowledge

My reality doesn't lie in the part I play, but in the unconscious decision as to what kind of part I assign to myself.

Wer sich nicht mit Politik befaßt, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen möchte, bereits vollzogen: er dient der herrschenden Partei.

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

That a plot has no real life of its 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 unsuccessful: once and for all

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

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 succeeded in living up to it; in fact, I had tenaciously been doing the very opposite.

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...