Robert Musil Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Robert MusilSource : Robert Musil (2015). “The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic”, p.292, Pan Macmillan
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“Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.”
-- Robert MusilSource : Robert Musil (2015). “The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic”, p.245, Pan Macmillan
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“One does what one is; one becomes what one does.”
-- Robert Musil -
“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.”
-- Robert MusilSource : Robert Musil (2017). “The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic”, p.10, Pan Macmillan
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“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.”
-- Robert Musil -
“Layer by layer art strips life bare.”
-- Robert MusilSource : Robert Musil (2012). “Posthumous Papers of a Living Author”, p.44, Archipelago
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“One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.”
-- Robert Musil -
“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.”
-- Robert Musil -
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“It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.”
-- 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 MusilSource : Robert Musil (2015). “The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic”, p.189, Pan Macmillan
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“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 -
“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 never to such kaleidoscopic effect.”
-- Robert Musil -
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“True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.”
-- Robert MusilSource : Robert Musil (2015). “The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic”, p.891, Pan Macmillan
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“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?”
-- Robert Musil -
“I also believe that few people remain completely untouched by the thought that instead of the life they lead there might also be another, where all actions proceed from a very personal state of excitement. Where actions have meanings, not just causes. And where a person, to use a trivial word, is happy, and not just nervously tormenting himself.”
-- Robert Musil -
“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.”
-- Robert Musil -
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“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 -
“We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.”
-- 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 -
“... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.”
-- Robert Musil -
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“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.”
-- Robert Musil -
“Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.”
-- Robert Musil -
“... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.”
-- Robert Musil -
“Life is to blame for everything.”
-- Robert MusilSource : Robert Musil (2012). “Posthumous Papers of a Living Author”, p.45, Archipelago
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“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 death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. "Losing one's head," language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience.”
-- Robert Musil -
“Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.”
-- Robert Musil -
“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!”
-- Robert Musil -
“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 -
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“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 it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.”
-- Robert Musil -
“An impractical man--which he not only seems to be, but really is--will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea.”
-- Robert Musil
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