97 Quotes by Robert Walser

That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.

To the devil with every miserable desire to seem more than one is.

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.

A person can be utterly foolish and unknowing: as long as he knows the way to adapt, to be flexible, and how to move about, he still is not lost, but will come through life better perhaps than someone who is clever and stuffed with knowledge.

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.

The barber’s assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings in the dark. Or I tell lies and say that I’m Danish. Some kinds of frankness are only hurtful and boring.

The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad.

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.

He was one of those people who feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them.