Robert Musil Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.

Robert Musil
For what do we do on the Last Day, when the works of humankind are weighted, with three treatises on formic acid, or even thirty? On the other hand, what do we know about the Last Day, if we don't even know what can be done with formic acid between now and then?

Robert Musil
True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.

Robert Musil
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
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
We engage in politics because we don't know anything. This is clearly revealed in the way we go about it. Our parties exist from a fear of theory. The voter fears that one idea can always be contradicted by another. Therefore the parties reciprocally defend themselves against the few old ideas they have inherited. They don't live from what they promise, but from frustrating the promises of others. This is their silent community of interests.

Robert Musil
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
And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

Robert Musil
There is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.

Robert Musil
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
Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

Robert Musil
He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.

Robert Musil
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
I also believe that few people remain completely untouched by the thought that instead of the life they lead there might also be another, where all actions proceed from a very personal state of excitement. Where actions have meanings, not just causes. And where a person, to use a trivial word, is happy, and not just nervously tormenting himself.

Robert Musil
What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.

Robert Musil
All professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.

Robert Musil
The novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

Robert Musil
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

Robert Musil
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
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
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
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
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
One spent tremendous amounts on the army; but just enough to assure one of remaining the second weakest among the great powers.

Robert Musil
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
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
If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.

Robert Musil