Robert Musil Quotes

And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

One does what one is; one becomes what one does.

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

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

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

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

... 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.

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

Life is to blame for everything.

It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.

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

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

Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.

The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

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

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

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.

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

Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.

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

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

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.

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

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

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

Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?

Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.

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.

the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress

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.

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.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!

... 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.

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

... 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.

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

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.

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!

...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.

... 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.

What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.