Quotes from Max Frisch

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

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

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.

We asked for workers. We got people instead.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

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.

You can put anything into words, except your own life

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.

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

Freunde müssen einander verstehen um Freunde zu bleiben. Brüder sind immer Brüder.

If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line." [ Paris Review , interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]

Es ist bemerkenswert, dass wir gerade von dem Menschen, den wir lieben, am mindesten aussagen können, wie er sei.

Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.

Wer sich nicht mit Politik befasst, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen wollte, bereits vollzogen.

Ich bin nicht Stiller!

Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don't want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn't always fun, you can't always be in form. Moreover, I have learned from experience that once you are not in form women don't remain in form either; as soon as they are bored they start complaining you've no feeling.

The demand that we love our neighbor as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created.

Die beste und sicherste Tarnung ist immer noch die blanke und nackte Wahrheit. Komischerweise die glaubt niemand.

She thought it stupid of a woman to want to be understood by a man; the man (said Hanna) wants the woman to be a mystery, so that he can be inspired and excited by his own incomprehension.

I called her a sentimentalist and artsy-craftsy. She called me Homo Faber.

Wieso seid ihr stärker als die Wahrheit

Wer sich nicht mit Politik befaßt, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen möchte, bereits vollzogen: er dient der herrschenden Partei.

A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.

Es gibt allerlei Arten, einen Menschen zu morden oder wenigstens seine Seele, und das merkt keine Polizei der Welt. Dann genügt ein Wort, eine Offenheit im rechten Augenblick. Dann genügt ein Lächeln. Ich möchte den Menschen sehen, der nicht durch Lächeln umzubringen ist oder durch Schweigen.