Al 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.

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.

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 uninteresting interesting things can become.

That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.

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

You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.

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

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 believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty.

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

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.

As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm.

Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.

Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable.

It is only true love when you have no choice. Love is the most highly valued disease that is identified by the symptom of You-can´t-help-it.

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

People who don't pay attention to the question of justification are often rather uninteresting, in my opinion. I am most fascinated by characters who struggle with the demands of justification.

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.

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

I started from nothing in Lichtenstein. The country is so small, and the only 'celebrity' type people who are from there are skiers.

I traveled the world as a DJ, as a singer, as a songwriter, as a producer.

If you become a viral star, that is terrific!

You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied.

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism.

If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path towards it is the path of language.

So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)

I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.

What we understand and love understands and loves us also.

I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called "the world, " and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.

Artists, as a rule, understand nothing about business, or, for some reason or other, they aren’t allowed to understand anything about it.

One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.

Se aburren quienes se pasan la vida esperando que algo los estimule desde fuera...

cuando se es joven hay que ser un cero a la izquierda, pues no existe nada más perjudicial que destacar pronto, prematuramente, en cualquier cosa.

God goes with thoughtless people.

How small life is hereand how big nothingness.The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow.The two trees bowtheir heads to each other.Clouds cross the world’ssilence in a circle dance