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.”

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

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

“Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.”

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

“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”

“Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”

“You can put anything into words, except your own life.”

“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”

“There is no art without Eros.”

“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?”

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

“Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge.”

“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.”

“Jealousy is the fear of comparison.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“My greatest fear: repetition.”