Robert Musil

“To the mind (Geist), good and evil, above and below, are not skeptical, relative concepts, but terms of a function, values that…

— Robert Musil

Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it…

— Robert Musil

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become…

— Robert Musil

“Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more…

— Robert Musil

Life is to blame for everything.

— Robert Musil

“Now I have something to tell you," her brother said. "Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people,…

— Robert Musil

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

— Robert Musil

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument

— Robert Musil

“Alles, was wir denken, ist entweder Zuneigung oder Abneigung.”

— Robert Musil

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

— Robert Musil

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

— Robert Musil

“Nowadays, thanks to their education in politics and economics, they are said to be different. But even at that time, as one…

— Robert Musil

“The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look…

— Robert Musil

“If a person is plagued by religious doubts,as many are in their youth, he takes to persecuting unbelievers; if troubled by love,…

— Robert Musil

Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands between…

— Robert Musil

“Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in…

— Robert Musil

On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this…

— Robert Musil

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone…

— Robert Musil

“he had to stand by while there proliferated in his own house such concepts as “the art of living thought” “the graph…

— Robert Musil

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

— Robert Musil

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more…

— Robert Musil

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

— Robert Musil

To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by…

— Robert Musil

A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature,…

— Robert Musil

“What's the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.”

— Robert Musil