Frisch Quotes & Sayings

We [Frisch and Lise Meitner] walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot (she said and proved that she could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by Bohr's idea that the nucleus was like a liquid drop; such a drop might elongate and divide itself. — Otto Robert Frisch

The second volume of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka ... [is] a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced life stories, but reading Stach's magnificent narrative (wonderfully translated by Shelley Frisch) straight through brings death, not life, to the forefront. Stach is a compulsively readable writer ... [A]s in the previous volume, the prose in The Years of Insight is supple and very appealingly complex
all of which, once again, is perfectly rendered by Frisch. — Steve Donoghue

I have been a Professor Emeritus since 1958, and have continued my scientific studies. — Karl Von Frisch

Nothing is harder than to accept oneself. — Max Frisch

Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable.
But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.
Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth — Max Frisch

The dignity of man is in free choice. — Max Frisch

Cause and effect are never divided between two people. — Max Frisch

My greatest fear: repetition. — Max Frisch

The point is to show who is the cross and who the crucified. — Max Frisch

When thou shewest Respect to any one, see that thy Submissions be proportionable to the Homage thou owest him. There is Stupidity and Pride in doing too little; but in over acting of it, there is Abjection and Hypocrisy. — Max Frisch

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. — Max Frisch

Any econometrician who wants to see practical application of his science will be highly concerned with applications to economic planning at the national level. — Ragnar Frisch

Why don't we follow our yearning? — Max Frisch

If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill! — Max Frisch

We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature ... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle. — Max Frisch

There is no art without Eros. — Max Frisch

As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna,is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed. — Max Frisch

I have no words for my reality. — Max Frisch

A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth. — Max Frisch

It is remarkable that the persons we love most are those we can least describe. — Max Frisch

The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory. — Max Frisch

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

there are some problems no Unix command can address. — Aeleen Frisch

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] — Max Frisch

We walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot (she said and proved that she could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by Bohr's idea that the nucleus was like a liquid drop; such a drop might elongate and divide itself.

{On his aunt and fellow science Lise Meitner} — Otto Robert Frisch

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

THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine istheir uglinesstheir pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin, ... the world as an Americanized vacuumtheir fake health, their fake youthfulnessthe way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death. — Max Frisch

It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living. — Max Frisch

Her supposition that I was melancholy because I was alone put me out of humour. I'm used to travelling alone. I live, like every real man, in my work. On the contrary, that's the way I like it and I think myself lucky to live alone, in my view this is the only possible condition for men, I enjoy waking up and not having to say a word. Where is the woman who can understand that? — Max Frisch

You can put anything into words, except your own life — Max Frisch

-only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes. — Max Frisch

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us. — Max Frisch

Today we no longer ask what really goes on in an atom; we ask what is likely to be observed-and with what likelihood-when we subject atoms to any specified influences such as light or heat, magnetic fields or electric currents. — Otto Robert Frisch

I live, like every real man, in my work. — Max Frisch

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

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

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

Why do dying people never shed tears? — Max Frisch

I will have nothing to do with a bomb! [Response to being invited (1943) to work with Otto Robert Frisch and some British scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.] — Lise Meitner

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

Our comparative fidelity was fear of defeat at the hands of another partner. — Max Frisch

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug. — Max Frisch

Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are ... — Max Frisch

I know that I'm the happiest of lovers ... — Max Frisch

The older you get the simpler you want to make it. — Max Frisch

I think managing shortened my playing career, but I was a better manager when I was playing, when I could lead like a platoon sergeant in the field rather than as a general sitting back on his duff in a command post. — Frankie Frisch

I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine. — Karl Von Frisch

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

Jealousy is the fear of comparison. — Max Frisch

A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light. — Ragnar Frisch

The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt, and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed. — Max Frisch

It's a beautiful day for a night game. — Frankie Frisch

It is conceivable at least that a late generation, such as we presumably are, has particular need of the sketch, in order not to be strangled to death by inherited conceptions which preclude new births ... The sketch has direction, but no ending; the sketch as reflection of a view of life that is no longer conclusive, or is not yet conclusive. — Max Frisch

Sabeth listened when I told her about my experiences, but as one listens to an old man; without interrupting, politely, without believing, without getting excited. — Max Frisch

After the first exams, I switched to the Faculty of Philosophy and studied Zoology in Munich and Vienna. — Karl Von Frisch

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. — Max Frisch

When Jordan took the court for the first time wearing his special red-and-black shoes, the NBA fined the Bulls $1,000 for violating the league's uniform dress code. Nike cleverly seized on the fine as a publicity opportunity, producing a television commercial that showed Jordan bouncing a ball as a voice said: "On September 15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On October 18, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can't keep you from wearing them. Air Jordans from Nike. — Aaron Frisch

The bee's life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water — Karl Von Frisch

All that remains is the mad desire for present identity through a woman. — Max Frisch

Scientists have one thing in common with children: curiosity. To be a good scientist you must have kept this trait of childhood, and perhaps it is not easy to retain just one trait. A scientist has to be curious like a child; perhaps one can understand that there are other childish features he hasn't grown out of. — Otto Robert Frisch

The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language. — Max Frisch

Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense. — Max Frisch

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

Technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance, ... the technologist's worldlessness ... My mistake lay in the factthat we technologists try to live without death. — Max Frisch

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. — Max Frisch

If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one. — Max Frisch

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

To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us — Max Frisch

We asked for workers. We got people instead. — Max Frisch

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

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

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

Nature has unlimited time in which to travel along tortuous paths to an unknown destination. The mind of man is too feeble to discern whence or whither the path runs and has to be content if it can discern only portions of the track, however small. — Karl Von Frisch

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

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

A person who does not concern himself with politics has already made the political choice he was so anxious to spare himself: he is serving the ruling party. — Max Frisch

I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate. — Max Frisch

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. — Max Frisch

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. — Max Frisch

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

There's nothing tough about playing Third. All a guy needs is a strong arm and a strong chest. — Frankie Frisch

Deep in the human nature, there is an almost irresistible tendency to concentrate physical and mental energy on attempts at solving problems that seem to be unsolvable. Indeed, for some kinds of active people, only the seemingly unsolvable problems can arouse their interest. — Ragnar Frisch

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

Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight. — Max Frisch

You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments! — Niels Bohr

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

Baseball is like this. Have one good year and you can fool them for five more, because for five more
years they expect you to have another good one. — Frankie Frisch

Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge. — Max Frisch

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. — Max Frisch

To write is to read one's own self — Max Frisch

The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite. — Karl Von Frisch

There is no such thing, as far as I'm concerned, as ownership in love. — Max Frisch

You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely — Max Frisch

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability. — Max Frisch

I received my doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1910. — Karl Von Frisch

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