Robert Walser Quotes

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls

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.

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.

Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway! ... You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.

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.

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

I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.

That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.

How uninteresting interesting things can become.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.

One is always half mad when one is shy of people.

This is freedom,' said the instructress, 'it's something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away. Now you can watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes.

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.

Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another’s loneliness strange.

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

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.