"Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous"

Max Frisch Literature See all quotes by Max Frisch →

React to this quote

More by Max Frisch

“Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?”

“He knows that every piece of selfknowledge which one cannot keep to oneself makes one smaller and smaller, he knows that he who cannot keep silent his wishes to be recognized in the greatness of his selfknowledge which is no selfknowledge if it cannot be kept silent, and one becomes hypersensitive one feels betrayed because one wants to be recognized by people, one becomes ridiculous ambitious in inverse ratio to ones selfknowledge”

“What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive.”

“It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that makes them a couple”

“...for no rational reason.”

“What hope have you know given up ?”

Resonant Thoughts

"Hubert Ronson, as I was to discover later, is the sort of European you are always coming across in Africa. I never made up my mind whether such men leave Europe because their talents are unappreciated…"

— John Pearson (author)

Art1930–2021

#mind

"By nature I mean here, like the naïvest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience. All I wish to suggest is that the tendency and accomplishment of this painting are …"

— Samuel Beckett

Literature1906–1989

#nature

"Better send in one good picture than a lot of poor ones, but then that good one must be so good that it almost walks out of the frame and becomes a portion of nature itself."

— Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch

Art1824–1903

#nature

"I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft…"

— Maureen Corrigan

Literature1955

#books