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
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!
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 choices world
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.
life world emotion
... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
clearly felt usual
Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.
hung people rested scarcely sensation trembling turn
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
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.
blame life-is
Life is to blame for everything.