Robert Musil Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.

Robert Musil
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
His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.

Robert Musil
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
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
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
… the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress

Robert Musil
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

Robert Musil
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
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
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
We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

Robert Musil
The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms.... Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Robert Musil
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
Believe me, what makes the human being truly free, and what takes away his freedom, what gives him true bliss and what destroys it, isn't subject to 'progress'—it is something every genuinely alive person knows perfectly well in his own heart, if he will just listen to it!

Robert Musil
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
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
There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

Robert Musil
It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.

Robert Musil
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
There is nothing more deplorable than those skeptics and reformers, liberal priests and humanistically-oriented scholars, who moan about soullessness, barren materialism, what is unsatisfying in mere science, and the cold play of atoms, and renounce intellectual precision, which is for them only a slight temptation. Then, with the help of some alleged emotional knowledge to satisfy the feelings, and with the necessary harmony and rounding-out of the world picture, all they invent is some universal spirit: a world-soul, or a God, who is nothing more than the world of the academic petite bourgeoisie which gives rise to him; at best, an oversoul who reads the newspaper and demonstrates a certain appreciation of social questions.

Robert Musil
A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.

Robert Musil