Top 70 Max Frisch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”

— Max Frisch

Featured in: Honesty Quotes

2. “If the going is getting too easy, maybe you’re going downhill!”

— Max Frisch

3. “Jealousy is the fear of comparison.”

— Max Frisch

4. “We asked for workers. We got people instead.”

— Max Frisch

5. “I have no words for my reality.”

— Max Frisch

6. “The dignity of man is in free choice.”

— Max Frisch

7. “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.”

— Max Frisch

8. “Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.”

— Max Frisch

9. “I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.”

— Max Frisch

10. “Every uniform corrupts one’s character.”

— Max Frisch

11. “Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.”

— Max Frisch

12. “Why don’t we follow our yearning?”

— Max Frisch

13. “Cause and effect are never divided between two people.”

— Max Frisch

14. “Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight.”

— Max Frisch

15. “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.”

— Max Frisch

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

— Max Frisch

17. “My greatest fear: repetition.”

— Max Frisch

18. “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.”

— Max Frisch

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

— Max Frisch

Featured in: Meaning of Life Quotes, Quotes About Stories

20. “The older you get the simpler you want to make it.”

— Max Frisch

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

— Max Frisch

22. “Everything happened exactly as I had intended it shouldn’t.”

— Max Frisch

23. “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.”

— Max Frisch

24. “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.”

— Max Frisch

25. “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.”

— Max Frisch

26. “Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body – we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!”

— Max Frisch

27. “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.”

— Max Frisch

28. “All that remains is the mad desire for present identity through a woman.”

— Max Frisch

29. “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?”

— Max Frisch

30. “There is no such thing, as far as I’m concerned, as ownership in love.”

— Max Frisch

31. “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.”

— Max Frisch

32. “A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.”

— Max Frisch

33. “I don’t believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.”

— Max Frisch

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

— Max Frisch

35. “If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.”

— Max Frisch

36. “If anyone has a conscience it’s generally a guilty one.”

— Max Frisch

37. “You can’t make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely.”

— Max Frisch

38. “I took the standpoint that the profession of technologist, a man who masters matter, is a masculine profession, if not the only masculine profession there is.”

— Max Frisch

39. “I had said what I never meant to say, but what has been said cannot be unsaid, I enjoyed our silence, I was completely sober again, but all the same I had no idea what I was thinking, probably nothing.”

— Max Frisch

40. “There is no art without Eros.”

— Max Frisch

41. “Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it’s a piece of humbug.”

— Max Frisch

42. “Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.”

— Max Frisch

43. “Our comparative fidelity was fear of defeat at the hands of another partner.”

— Max Frisch

44. “The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn’t understand the horse dealer’s language.”

— Max Frisch

45. “Why do dying people never shed tears?”

— Max Frisch

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

— Max Frisch

47. “People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?”

— Max Frisch

48. “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.”

— Max Frisch

49. “I live, like every real man, in my work.”

— Max Frisch

50. “Stillertook part in the Spanish Civil WarIt is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined – a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.”

— Max Frisch