Max Frisch Quotes

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.

Every uniform corrupts one's character.

Jealousy is the fear of comparison.

A joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment... But the best camouflage of all - in my opinion - is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it.

We asked for workers. We got people instead.

Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

There is no art without Eros.

It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.

I have no words for my reality.

When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.

In actual fact those who do not care for politics and sit on the fence do indeed side for a political party: The ruling party.

The point is to show who is the cross and who the crucified.

Why do dying people never shed tears?

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.

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

You can put anything into words, except your own life.

My greatest fear: repetition.

Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

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

Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge.

If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill!

I live, like every real man, in my work.

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.

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.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.

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

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

There is no such thing, as far as I'm concerned, as ownership in love.

The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language.

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

Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.

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

The dignity of man is in free choice.

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.

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

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.

I know that I'm the happiest of lovers.

When you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?

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!

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

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.

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.

Cause and effect are never divided between two people.

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

The demand that we love our neighbor as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created.

Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.

Why don't we follow our yearning?

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.

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