Robert Walser famous quotes

03-23-2025

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

#Wall #Cities #Ancient
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

#Thinking #Want #Forget
That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.
-- Robert Walser

#Mouths
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.
-- Robert Walser

#Pain #Smart #Blood
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.
-- Robert Walser

#Beautiful #Lying #Book
How uninteresting interesting things can become.
-- Robert Walser

#Interesting #Interesting Things
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

#Beautiful #Facts #Wonderful
That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.
-- Robert Walser

#Lovely
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, itâ€™s easy to stay silent.
-- Robert Walser

#Damage #Wonderful #Realizing
Listening to music, I always have exactly the same feeling: somethingâ€™s missing. Never will I learn the cause of this gentle sadness, never will I wish to investigate it.
-- Robert Walser

#Sadness #Missing #Feelings
I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.
-- Robert Walser

#Writing #Mad
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

#Book #Writing #Might
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

#Love Is #Likes #Praise God
One is always half mad when one is shy of people.
-- Robert Walser

#Mad #People #Half
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

#Suffering #Weakness #Misery
With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.
-- Robert Walser

#Beautiful #Ideas #One Day
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

#Stories #Answers #Given
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 worldâ€™s silence in a circle dance
-- Robert Walser

#Tired #Light #Sky

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