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
believe school errors
It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
religious feet people
...love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.
virtue granted hours
You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody's been living for them, not even for a single hour.
numbers add brilliant
[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
attention here-and-there found
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 make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.
stupid mean men
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 above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.
clothes tangled quality
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 tubes and excrescences worthy of being classed with such facial decorations as the ring through the nose or the lip-stretching disk. But how enchanting they become when seen togetherwith the qualities they bestow on their wearer! What happens then is no less than the infusion, into some tangled lines on a piece of paper, of the meaning of a great word.
use world want
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, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.
army people world
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
world invisible this-world
There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
reality men giving
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 may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.
running people together
Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.
art mean perfect
Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?
men wicked machines
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.