Max Frisch
69 quotes
Biography
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment.
"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?"
"Nothing is harder than to accept oneself."
"The renunciation of recognition will never become possible without a certitude that our life is directed by a suprahuman authority."
"The horror of uncreative solitude....."
"How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses."
"You merely had an affair with me, to be exact, and therefore no right to prevent me from another affair.'"
"Cause and effect are never divided between two people"
"You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely."
"It is a sign of non love that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of ones neighbors."
"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."
"Carrying on with the conversation like a woman when the bill comes..."
"They wanted what is possible only once: the now."
"Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful."
"I know that I'm the happiest of lovers..."
"It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that makes them a couple"
"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"
"The monstruous paradox that people come closer to one another without words"
"We nest in an accident whose precarious balance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us"
"To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us"
"Time does not change us it just unfolds us"
"Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous"
"How can we ever judge a human being when he is and he will always be another person"
"Uniforms ruin every character"
"'Everything that is human looks like a special case'"
"Overcoming prejudice: the only possible way through love, which creates no graven images."