Quotes from Robert Walser

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.

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.

You do see me crossing the meadow stiff and dead from the mist? I long for that home, that home I've never had, and without any hope that I'll ever be able to reach it. For such a home, never touched, I carry that longing that will never die, like that meadow dies stiff and dead from the mist. You do see me crossing it, full of dread?

Siento que la vida exige emociones, no reflexiones.

It is a very painful thing, having to part company with what torments you. And how mute the world is!

God goes with thoughtless people.

That's what's so miraculous about the city: each person's bearing and behavior vanish among these thousand sorts, observations are fleeting, judgements swift, and forgetting inevitable.

Something feels like it's missing when I haven't heard any music, and when I hear music, then I really feel like something is missing. That's the best I can do in trying to describe music.

I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn't know what to do with all that money.

Ah, all these thoughts, all this peculiar yearning, this seeking, this stretching out of hands toward a meaning. Let it all dream, let it all sleep. I'll simply let it come. Let it come.

My cheeks are red hot, my lip still trembles, because I sent my heart to speak; every word of it delusional and awkward, an exuberance, an abrupt sound. That's how I spoke, oh, it still shows on my hot cheeks I'm now carrying home. I look down at the snow and walk past many houses, past many hedges, many trees, the snow adorns hedge, tree and house. I walk on, staring down at the snow, on my cheeks nothing but red-hot memory reminding me of my wild talk.

What honest man was never in his life without sustenance? And what human being has ever seen as the years pass his hopes, plans, and dreams completely undestroyed? Where is the soul whose longings and daring aspirations, whose sweet and lofty imaginings of happiness have been fulfilled without that soul's having had to deduct a discount?

I know this perfectly well, but it was precisely this that I liked - her thinking me silly. Such a peculiar vice: to be secretly pleased to be allowed to observe that one is being slightly robbed.

I imagine that it would be unspeakably lovely to die with the terrible knowledge that I have offended whosoever I love the most and have filled them with bad opinions of me.

On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.

Hace algún tiempo que el mundo gira en torno al dinero, ya no en torno a la historia.

The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad.

Naturally I am of the deeply felt conviction that it is quite nice, quite lovely to be capable of enthusiam.

Debería estar completamente solo en este mundo, yo, Steiner, sin ninguna otra criatura. Sin sol, sin cultura. Yo, desnudo sobre una gran piedra sin tormentas, sin nieve, sin bancos, sin dinero, sin tiempo y sin respiración. Entonces, por fin, dejaría de tener miedo.

Estimado señor, le ruego que deje de creer en mí.

What a terrible dream I had a few days ago. [...] To the knives and forks clung the tears of enemies I destroyed, and the glasses sang with the sighs of many poor people, but the tear-stains only made me want to laugh, while the hopeless sighs sounded to me like music. I needed banquet music and had it.

He gave such a vulnerable impression. He resembled the leaf that a little boy strikes down from its branch with a stick, because its singularity makes it conspicuous.

Vivamos primero, que las observaciones vendrán luego por sí solas.

He was one of those people who feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them.