Max Frisch
Jealousy is the fear of comparison.Collection: Jealousy
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.Collection: Experience
Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.Collection: Time
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?Collection: Humor
I have no words for my reality.
There is no art without Eros.
There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that's something no police in the world can spot.
The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language.
It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.
Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.
You can put anything into words, except your own life.
It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.
My greatest fear: repetition.
Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.
Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge.
I live, like every real man, in my work.
A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.
Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.
If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.
Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.
We know that every person who is loved feels transformed, unfolded, and he unfolds everything, the most intimate as well as the most familiar, to the one who loves him as well as to himself.... The person one loves is as ungraspable as the universe, as God's infinite space, he is boundless, full of possibilities, full of secrets.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Believe
We asked for workers. We got people instead.Collection: People
If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill!Collection: Easy
When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Distance
The older you get the simpler you want to make it.Collection: Want
The point is to show who is the cross and who the crucified.Collection: Marriage
The dignity of man is in free choice.Collection: Freedom
Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight.Collection: Progress
In actual fact those who do not care for politics and sit on the fence do indeed side for a political party: The ruling party.Collection: Freedom
A real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive.... It's difficult to say what makes a life a real life.... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself.Collection: Real
I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.Collection: Hate
There is no such thing, as far as I'm concerned, as ownership in love.Collection: Ownership
Why do dying people never shed tears?Collection: Death
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.Collection: Demand
Thou shalt not, it is said, make unto thee any graven image of God. The same commandment should apply when God is taken to mean the living part of every human being, the part that cannot be grasped. It is a sin that, however much it is committed against us, we almost continually commit ourselves--Except when we love.Collection: Love
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.Collection: Technology
Every uniform corrupts one's character.Collection: Character
You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completelyCollection: Losing
Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.Collection: Guilt
If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.Collection: Writing
Perhaps there are only a few women who experience without deception the overwhelming intoxication of the senses which they expectfrom their encounters with men, which they feel bound to expect because of the fuss made about it in novels, written by men.Collection: Men
Travelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic.Collection: Travel
Why don't we follow our yearning?Collection: Yearning
The machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.Collection: Men
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.Collection: People
It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans.Collection: Men
The technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living.Collection: Technology