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
hands clothes stupidity
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 only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.
agreement order people
Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.
soul littles matter
We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul,
thinking feelings limits
With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.
mother book writing
But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
luxury today reason
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
life determination intellectual
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.
book unusual cases
Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.
reality awakening would-be
It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.
sacrifice endure impression
Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
fall learning crystals
The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.
feelings intellectual connections
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
men average ideas
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.
numbers people temptation
... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.