Robert Musil Quotes

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.

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.

One does what one is; one becomes what one does.

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth; later we can often sense a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.

...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.

Life is to blame for everything.

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.

... for the modern soul, for which it is mere child's play to bridge oceans and continents, there is nothing so impossible as to find the contact with the souls dwelling just around the corner.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

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.

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

... 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.

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.

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.

Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?

The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

... 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.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

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.