Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities (1940)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Musil