Max Frisch Quotes

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.

We asked for workers. We got people instead.

Jealousy is the fear of comparison.

We know that every person who is loved feels transformed, unfolded, and he unfolds everything, the most intimate as well as the most familiar, to the one who loves him as well as to himself.... The person one loves is as ungraspable as the universe, as God's infinite space, he is boundless, full of possibilities, full of secrets.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.

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

I have no words for my reality.

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

The dignity of man is in free choice.

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

A real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive.... It's difficult to say what makes a life a real life.... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself.

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.

My greatest fear: repetition.

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

Why don't we follow our yearning?

Why do dying people never shed tears?

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.

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