All Robert Musil Quotes
- 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… All
- There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument Invisible
- 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… Arranged
- To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of… Art
- He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration. Allowed
- It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises… Bearing
- Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system. Army
- Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop. Inspirational
- 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,… Cast
- 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… Big
- Clothes, when abstracted from the flow of present time and their transmogrifying function on the human body, and seen as forms in themselves, are strange… Abstracted
- We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul, Intellect
- 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. Earth
- Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today. Bold
- In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are… Analogy
- With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. ... As soon as it lays… Becomes
- the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress Intellectual
- I am not only convinced that what I say is false, but also that what one might say against it is false. Despite this, one… All
- It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it! All
- 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! Actually Paintings
- Layer by layer art strips life bare. Art
- 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… Anyone
- What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of… Assumes
- One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic. Age
- Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing. Acts