Quotes from Robert Walser

Money rules the world, and doubtless also, here and there, the bit of love within it, and when love turns to hate, one remembers unpaid board.

Às pessoas saudáveis faço o seguinte apelo: não teimem em ler apenas esses livros saudáveis, travem um conhecimento mais estreito, também, com a literatura dita doentia, que vos transmitirá, decerto, uma cultura edificante. As pessoas saudáveis deveriam sempre expor-se um pouco ao perigo. Senão, com mil raios, para que serve ser saudável? Simplesmente para, num determinado dia, morrer de boa saúde?

Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.

Hablando en serio: los que obedecen suelen ser una copia exacta de los que mandan.

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

Instances of delightfulness are always intrinsically beautiful, so to speak, and yet under the right circumstances they may be swinish as well, for what is humanly beautiful might, as it were, be too beautiful for human beings, for which reason people are glad to place beauty in proximity to pigpens, as one is no doubt justified in saying.

Wallets can establish connections and change opinions. Things that fall apart can be glued back by money with astonishing alacrity.

A quienes conservan el sano juicio les hago el siguiente llamamiento: no leáis siempre y de manera exclusiva esos libros sanos; acercaos un poquito a la llamada literatura enfermiza, de la que tal vez podáis sacar un consuelo vital. La gente sana debería arriesgarse siempre de una u otra manera. ¿Para qué demonios, si no, conservar el sano juicio? ¿Para morir un día saludablemente? Vaya un futuro desolador

More people perish than want to. Death comes running with astonishing speed, strikes his victims with marvelous accuracy. These include generals, doctors, governesses, soldiers, policemen, ministers. None of them pass away peacefully, as it says in the newspapers. Their executions are violent enough.

Everything that's forbidden lives a hundred times over; thus, if something is supposed to be dead, its life is all the livelier.

We grasp one thing after another, and when we have grasped a thing, it is as if it possessed us. Not we possess it, but the opposite: whatever we have apparently acquired rules over us then. It is impressed upon us that a beneficent effect is to be had from acquiring a little that is firm and definite, that is to say, from growing accustomed and shaping oneself to laws and commands that prescribe a strict external discipline. Perhaps we're being stupefied, certainly we're being made small.

I act uncommonly important when I read, look all around to see if people are noticing how cleverly someone there is improving his mind and wits; I slit open page after page at splendid leisure, do not even read any more but satisfy myself with having assumed the posture of a person immersed in a book. That is how I am: harebrained, and all for effect. I am vain, but my satisfaction with my vanity costs remarkably little.

The barber's assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings in the dark. Or I tell lies and say that I'm Danish. Some kinds of frankness are only hurtful and boring.

Mysteries make one dream of unendurable bewitchments, they have the fragrance of something quite, quite unspeakably beautiful.

Acaso durmiendo es cuando más cerca estamos de Dios.

The best-trained part of us, though, is the mouth, it ?is always obediently and devoutly shut. And it's only too true: an open mouth is a yawning fact, the fact that its owner is dwelling with his few thoughts in some other place than the domain and pleasure-garden of attentiveness.

My life till now seems to have been fairly empty, and the certainty that it will remain empty gives a feeling of endlessness, a feeling which tells one to go to sleep, and to do only the most unavoidable things.

Let us see to it that ponderers, thinkers, feelers survive in our midst.

In the sweet light of love I believed I was able to recognize—or required to feel—that the inward self is the only self which really exists.

Wherever poesie can be felt, all poetic touches are superfluous.

After a spent day, I walked back in a fever. The whole way home the sun touched my cheeks. The blissful evening glow spread across the meadows and I called this light the blood I shed. My hot burning blood lay consoling the entire world. So I walked with pride-- Now that all was tilled. I didn't know what was happening, I leaned against a fence post, in my blood that covered the meadows near and far.

Before our eyes, at least before mine (not hers, perhaps), everything was veiled in impenetrable darkness. It's the inner chambers, I thought, and I wasn't wrong, either. That's how it was, and my dear instructress seemed to be resolved to show me a world that had been hidden until now. But I must pause for breath.

Man paßt dahin, wohin man sich sehnt.

Exceptional estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excrutiating.