Quotes from Robert Walser

I'm not here to write, I'm here to be mad.

We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

Mir fehlt etwas, wenn ich keine Musik höre, und wenn ich Musik höre, fehlt mir erst recht etwas. Dies ist das Beste, was ich über Musik zu sagen weiß.

I cannot live and at the same time despise my life. I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life.

What we understand and love understands and loves us also.

A park like this resembles a large, silent, isolated room. In fact it's always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it's always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child.

A girl sitting with us in the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end.

Los versos que resuenan en su cerebro le parecen graznidos de cuervos; le gustaría arrancarse la memoria.

He doesn't see his path clearly, but also doesn't consider this absolutely necessary; he strikes out in some direction or other, and one thing leads to the next. All paths lead to lives of some sort, and that's all he requires, for every life promises a great deal and is replete with possibilities enchantingly fulfilled.

Las naturalezas creativas no son especulativas. Eso las distingue de los imitadores.

Wherever there are children, there will always be injustice.

God is the opposite of Rodin.

Nothing peerless has lasting value.

A person can be utterly foolish and unknowing: as long as he knows the way to adapt, to be flexible, and how to move about, he still is not lost, but will come through life better perhaps than someone who is clever and stuffed with knowledge.

Everything dreamed because it was alive, and everything lived because it was permitted to dream.

To the devil with every miserable desire to seem more than one is.

And the pine trees that smell so wonderfully of spicy power. Shall I never see a mountain pine again? Really that would be no misfortune. To forgo something: that also has its fragrance and its power.

Perhaps there were a few repetitions here and there. But I would like to confess that I consider nature and human life to be a lovely and charming flow of fleeting repetitions, and I would like further to confess that I regard this phenomenon as a beauty and a blessing.

Failure's sleeve cannot help but brush against the back of gratified desires and insatiability is inevitably left to gaze with smoldering eyes into the wise, peaceful eyes of a person who finds satiation within himself.

I am constructing here a commonsensical book from which nothing at all can be learned. There are, to be sure, persons who wish to extract from books guiding principles for their lives. For this most estimable individual I am therefore, to my gigantic regret, not writing. Is that a pity? Oh yes. O you driest, most upright, virtuous and respectable, kindest, quietest of adventurers- slumber sweetly, for the while.

I had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible.

A heaven opens when people are kind to one another.

I am dying of the incomprehension of those who could have seen me and held me, dying of the emptiness of cautious and clever people, and of the lovelessness of hesitancy and not-much-liking.

To be alone: icy, iron terror, foretaste of the grave, forerunner of unpitying death. Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another's loneliness strange.