Top 60 Robert Walser Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”

— Robert Walser

2. “At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.”

— Robert Walser

3. “How small life is here and how big nothingness. The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow. The two trees bow their heads to each other. Clouds cross the world’s silence in a circle dance.”

— Robert Walser

4. “That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.”

— Robert Walser

5. “When we realize that words can destroy something good, wonderful, and dear, and that by keeping silent we can avoid causing the least damage or harm, it’s easy to stay silent.”

— Robert Walser

6. “Wherever there are children, there will always be injustice.”

— Robert Walser

7. “How uninteresting interesting things can become.”

— Robert Walser

8. “I don’t want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.”

— Robert Walser

9. “That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.”

— Robert Walser

10. “It doesn’t take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise God, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave.”

— Robert Walser

11. “Walk,′ was my answer, ‘I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world... Without walking, I would be dead.”

— Robert Walser

12. “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.”

— Robert Walser

13. “One is always half mad when one is shy of people.”

— Robert Walser

14. “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”

— Robert Walser

15. “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.”

— Robert Walser

16. “Ah, all these thoughts, all this peculiar yearning, this seeking, this stretching out of hands toward a meaning. Let it all dream, let it all sleep. I’ll simply let it come. Let it come.”

— Robert Walser

17. “God is the opposite of Rodin.”

— Robert Walser

18. “In the forest you pray involuntarily, and it’s also the only place in the world where God is near; God seems to have created forests so we can pray in them as if in sacred temples; one person prays in one way, another in another, but everyone prays. When you lie beneath a fir tree reading a book, you are praying, if praying is the same as being lost in thought. Let God be where He will, in the forest you can sense Him, and you offer up your little bit of belief with silent rapture.”

— Robert Walser

19. “It is a very painful thing, having to part company with what torments you. And how mute the world is!”

— Robert Walser

20. “Listening to music, I always have exactly the same feeling: something’s missing. Never will I learn the cause of this gentle sadness, never will I wish to investigate it.”

— Robert Walser

21. “To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.”

— Robert Walser

22. “Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.”

— Robert Walser

23. “The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.”

— Robert Walser

24. “One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.”

— Robert Walser

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

— Robert Walser

26. “The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad.”

— Robert Walser

27. “Questions are usually more beautiful, more significant than their resolutions, which in fact never resolve them, are never sufficient to satisfy us, whereas from a question streams a wonderful fragrance.”

— Robert Walser

28. “Something feels like it’s missing when I haven’t heard any music, and when I hear music, then I really feel like something is missing. That’s the best I can do in trying to describe music.”

— Robert Walser

29. “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.”

— Robert Walser

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

— Robert Walser

31. “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.”

— Robert Walser

32. “I contemplated pride and love. All this contemplativeness. When will I be free of it?”

— Robert Walser

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

— Robert Walser

34. “I know this perfectly well, but it was precisely this that I liked – her thinking me silly. Such a peculiar vice: to be secretly pleased to be allowed to observe that one is being slightly robbed.”

— Robert Walser

35. “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad.”

— Robert Walser

36. “I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life. What is respect compared to this other thing: being happy and having satisfied the heart’s pride. Even being unhappy is better than being respected. I am unhappy despite the respect I enjoy; and so in my own eyes I don’t deserve this respect; for I consider only happiness worthy of respect. Therefore I must try whether it is possible to be happy without insisting on respect.”

— Robert Walser

37. “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.”

— Robert Walser

38. “With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.”

— Robert Walser

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

— Robert Walser

40. “I wanted to speak with someone, but found no time; sought some fixed point, but found none. In the midst of the unrelenting forward thrust I felt the wish to stand still. The muchness and the motion were too much and too fast. Everyone withdrew from everyone. There was a running, as of something liquefied, a constant going forth, as of evaporation. Everything was schematic, ghostlike, even myself.”

— Robert Walser

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

— Robert Walser

42. “If a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favoured me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.”

— Robert Walser

43. “To me it’s as if the day has been tossed into my lap by a benevolent god who likes to gives things to good-for-nothings.”

— Robert Walser

44. “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.”

— Robert Walser

45. “What we understand and love understands and loves us also.”

— Robert Walser

46. “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.”

— Robert Walser

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

— Robert Walser

48. “I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.”

— Robert Walser

49. “He was one of those people who feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them.”

— Robert Walser

50. “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.”

— Robert Walser