Top 94 Quotes About Musil
#1. A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.
Italo Svevo
#2. All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!
Robert Musil
#3. [ ... ] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
Robert Musil
#4. Youth's scorn and its revolt against the established order, youth's readiness for everything that is heroic, whether it is self-sacrifice or crime, its fiery seriousness and its unsteadiness - all this is nothing but its fluttering attempts to fly.
Robert Musil
#5. Things seemed to consist not of wood and stone but of some grandiose and infinitely tender immorality that, the moment it came in contact with him, turned into a deep moral shock.
Robert Musil
#6. The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
Robert Musil
#7. We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.
Robert Musil
#8. Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
Robert Musil
#9. His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.
Robert Musil
#10. That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.
Robert Musil
#11. For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.
Robert Musil
#12. There is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.
Robert Musil
#13. Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
Robert Musil
#14. The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.
Robert Musil
#15. The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world's eyes, the world already in one's own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky.
Robert Musil
#16. The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.
Robert Musil
#17. The structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it
Robert Musil
#18. And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.
Robert Musil
#19. Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth; later we can often sense a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.
Robert Musil
#20. Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.
Robert Musil
#21. Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.
Robert Musil
#22. It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.
Robert Musil
#23. A motorcyclist rode down the empty street, arms and legs rounded in an O, and came back up with the sound of thunder; his face displayed seriousness of a child who attributes the utmost importance to his howls
Robert Musil
#24. He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.
Robert Musil
#25. And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.
Robert Musil
#26. You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you
take it for granted that nobody's been living for them, not even for a
single hour.
Robert Musil
#28. But how do I get to having to write a book? ... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
Robert Musil
#29. In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really know she had: a soul.
What's that? It is easy to define negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.
Robert Musil
#30. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.
Robert Musil
#31. With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.
Robert Musil
#32. The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.
Robert Musil
#33. Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.
Robert Musil
#34. True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.
Robert Musil
#35. Man is indisputably endowed with reason; the problem is only how he uses his reason in the company of others.
Robert Musil
#36. The one thing that remains permanently behind the times, especially because it prides itself on its steadfastness, is the human heart, most of all that of the conscientious man. The mind is never so hard, dry, and twisted as when it has a slight chronic heart condition.
Robert Musil
#37. The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian ... He's bound to lose perspective.
Robert Musil
#38. One does what one is; one becomes what one does.
Robert Musil
#39. Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
Lorrie Moore
#40. It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.
Robert Musil
#41. In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.
Robert Musil
#42. At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: "Why do you keep on pushing me away?" The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.
Robert Musil
#43. He was in that familiar state - not that the occasion mattered to seriously to him
of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit.
Robert Musil
#44. All professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.
Robert Musil
#45. Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?
Robert Musil
#46. Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can't afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
Robert Musil
#47. The genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.
Robert Musil
#48. I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.
Robert Musil
#49. Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
Robert Musil
#50. What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.
Robert Musil
#51. Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.
Robert Musil
#52. A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?
Robert Musil
#53. We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul,
Robert Musil
#54. Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people's goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know.
Robert Musil
#55. There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [ ... ] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.
Robert Musil
#56. Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
Robert Musil
#57. The novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.
Robert Musil
#58. The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.
Robert Musil
#59. Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.
Robert Musil
#60. On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
Robert Musil
#61. For the modern soul, for which it is mere child's play to bridge oceans and continents, there is nothing so impossible as to find the contact with the souls dwelling just around the corner.
Robert Musil
#62. There is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
Robert Musil
#63. What's the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.
Robert Musil
#64. Love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.
Robert Musil
#65. There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart.
Robert Musil
#66. Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.
Robert Musil
#67. It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.
Robert Musil
#68. One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
#69. If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.
Robert Musil
#70. Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
Robert Musil
#71. The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!
Robert Musil
#72. Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.
Robert Musil
#73. The restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Robert Musil
#74. A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.
Robert Musil
#75. Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.
Robert Musil
#76. It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.
Robert Musil
#78. Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering ... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.
Robert Musil
#79. Nothing is more human than substituting the quantity of words and actions for their character. But using imprecise words is very similar to using lots of words, for the more imprecise a word is, the greater the area it covers.
Robert Musil
#80. The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the
right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else;
and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide
semi-circle: alone.
Robert Musil
#81. It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
Robert Musil
#82. Wordsworth's particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time was
to Plato and who else?
The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!
Robert Musil
#83. To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying.
Robert Musil
#84. The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.
Robert Musil
#85. The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.
Robert Musil
#86. Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.
Robert Musil
#87. You see how wrong I go, how ridiculous I'm making myself in your eyes by keeping on guessing wrong like this! Doesn't that help you to come out with it? Come on now!
Robert Musil
#88. A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
Robert Musil
#89. Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?
Robert Musil
#90. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
Robert Musil
#91. We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.
Robert Musil
#92. Such elderly people were in the habit of saying that he simply had no will-power; but it might just as well have been said that he had all his life long only been a many-sided dilettante.
Robert Musil
#93. A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.
Robert Musil
#94. Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
Robert Musil
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