Robert Walser Quotes

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls

I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.

When we realize that words can destroy something good, wonderful, and dear, and that by keeping silent we can avoid causing the least damage or harm, it’s easy to stay silent.

At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.

Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.

I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.

Listening to music, I always have exactly the same feeling: something’s missing. Never will I learn the cause of this gentle sadness, never will I wish to investigate it.

How uninteresting interesting things can become.

That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.

With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.

That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.

The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.

One is always half mad when one is shy of people.

To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.

Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another’s loneliness strange.

I contemplated pride and love. All this contemplativeness. When will I be free of it?

It doesn't take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise God, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave.

So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)

I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.

What we understand and love understands and loves us also.

I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called "the world, " and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.

Artists, as a rule, understand nothing about business, or, for some reason or other, they aren’t allowed to understand anything about it.

One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.

Se aburren quienes se pasan la vida esperando que algo los estimule desde fuera...

cuando se es joven hay que ser un cero a la izquierda, pues no existe nada más perjudicial que destacar pronto, prematuramente, en cualquier cosa.

God goes with thoughtless people.

How small life is hereand how big nothingness.The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow.The two trees bowtheir heads to each other.Clouds cross the world’ssilence in a circle dance