Robert Musil Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Musil
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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