Robert Musil
Robert Musil
Robert Musilwas an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualitiesis generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth6 November 1880
CountryAustria
art air tools
Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?
air singing kitsch
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.
average achievement genius
... 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.
party ideas community
... we engage in politics because we don't know anything. This is clearly revealed in the way we go about it. Our parties exist from a fear of theory. The voter fears that one idea can always be contradicted by another. Therefore the parties reciprocally defend themselves against the few old ideas they have inherited. They don't live from what they promise, but from frustrating the promises of others. This is their silent community of interests.
jobs reading writing
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.
book reading perspective
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.
art intellectual age
... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.
bridges frozen pages
... 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.
men together world
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!
blame life-is
Life is to blame for everything.
cutting feelings way
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.
thinking together ease
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.
men play want-something
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?
men suffering damage
A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.