Robert Musil Quotes

64 quotes in 1102 categories

• 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…
• That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for…
• 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…
• 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…
• Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands between that person and…
• If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.
• 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…
• True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.
• It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and…
• A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.
• One does what one is; one becomes what one does.
• 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…
• And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Life is to blame for everything.
• The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I…
• 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…
• Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

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