Robert Musil - Reads Quotes

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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

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

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