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Top Robert Musil Quotes

Browse top 84 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Robert Musil.

Favorite Robert Musil Quotes

1. "What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams and fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reaching their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and unhappier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as if we were characters in a novel who have met in the pages of a book. Let's in any case leave off all the fatty tissue that plumps up reality." ~ Robert Musil
2. "Jede menschliche Nase riecht unweigerlich sofort den zarten Hauch von Unabhängigkeit, Gewohnheit, zu befehlen, Gewohnheit, überall das Beste für sich zu wählen, leichter Weltverachtung und beständiger Machtverantwortung, der von einem großen und sicheren Einkommen aufstieg." ~ Robert Musil
3. "One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic." ~ Robert Musil
4. "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." ~ Robert Musil
5. "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." ~ Robert Musil
6. "His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another." ~ Robert Musil
7. "A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage." ~ Robert Musil
8. "[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit." ~ Robert Musil
9. "…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life's journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything's coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people's lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them" ~ Robert Musil
10. "Ich weiß jetzt nichts von Rätseln. Alles geschieht: Das ist die ganze Weisheit." ~ Robert Musil
11. "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." ~ Robert Musil
12. "It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves. And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream – the life that now lay open before him." ~ Robert Musil
13. "And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit." ~ Robert Musil
14. "Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven.The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you'd think it was a flashlight.Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around." ~ Robert Musil
15. "Er blätterte in den dicken, alten Alben mit Lichtbildern seiner Familie, [...], und je näher er den Anfängen dieser neuen Bildkunst zu blätterte, desto stolzer, kam ihm vor, hatten sich die Menschen ihr dargeboten." ~ Robert Musil
16. "Een huivering liep als op dunne spinnenpoten heen en weer over zijn rug, zette zich vast tussen zijn schouderbladen en trok met fijne klauwtjes zijn hoofdhuid strak naar achteren." ~ Robert Musil
17. "The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world's eyes, the world already in one's own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky." ~ Robert Musil
18. "Now I have something to tell you," her brother said. "Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play." ~ Robert Musil
19. "His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired." ~ Robert Musil
20. "Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - itcomes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts,because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not beingable to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in yourown any longer than you have to." ~ Robert Musil
21. "Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier." ~ Robert Musil
22. "When one's married for so long, always walking on four feet and alwaysbreathing double breaths and thinking every thought twice through andthe time between the main things is packed double full with minordetails - then, sometimes, naturally, one yearns like an arrow for onewhole space thin as air. And you start up in the night, terrified byyour own breathing, which had just been going along as evenly withoutyou. But you don't rise up free - or even really as far as your knees- not once. You strike a match. And there's one of you right there,wrapped in flesh. Only then is it love." ~ Robert Musil
23. "... ohne den Menschen etwas vorschreiben zu dürfen, würde die Moral gar kein Vergnügen bereiten." ~ Robert Musil
24. "For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality's capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay." ~ Robert Musil
25. "It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!" ~ Robert Musil
26. "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!" ~ Robert Musil
27. "Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression." ~ Robert Musil
28. "Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?" ~ Robert Musil
29. "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." ~ Robert Musil
30. "It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it." ~ Robert Musil
31. "Layer by layer art strips life bare." ~ Robert Musil
32. "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." ~ Robert Musil
33. "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." ~ Robert Musil
34. "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." ~ Robert Musil
35. "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." ~ Robert Musil
36. "In dem erfrorenen, versteinerten Körper der Stadt fühlte er ganz zu innerst sein Herz schlagen." ~ Robert Musil
37. "We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone." ~ Robert Musil
38. "Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber." ~ Robert Musil
39. "The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now theright-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else;and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a widesemi-circle: alone." ~ Robert Musil
40. "Unsere Zeit ist eine Zeit der Erfüllung, und Erfüllungen sind immer Enttäuschungen." ~ Robert Musil
41. "Der Zug der Zeit ist ein Zug, der seine Schienen vor sich her rollt. Der Fluß der Zeit ist ein Fluß, der seine Ufer mitführt." ~ Robert Musil
42. "She liked to convey that she was well acquainted with the smartness and the manners of the stylish world, but that she had got beyond all that sort of thing. She was fond of declaring that she did not care a snap of the fingers for that, or for herself, or indeed for anything whatsoever. On this account, and in spite of her blowsiness, she enjoyed a certain degree of respect among the peasant lads of the neighbourhood. True, they spat when they spoke of her, and felt obliged to treat her with even more coarseness than other girls, but at bottom they were really mightily proud of this ‘damned slut' who had issued from their own midst and who had so thoroughly seen through the veneer of the world." ~ Robert Musil
43. "He was in that familiar state - not that the occasion mattered to seriously to him -- of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit." ~ Robert Musil
44. "In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really know she had: a soul.What's that? It is easy to define negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series." ~ Robert Musil
45. "Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary." ~ Robert Musil
46. "The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end." ~ Robert Musil
47. "L'amour ne consiste que dans la faculté ou l'occasion fortuite de transmettre à un autre ce qu'on ressent soi-même." ~ Robert Musil
48. "Eine große Erkenntnis vollzieht sich nur zur Hälfte im Lichtkreise des Gehirns, zur anderen Hälfte in dem dunklen Boden des Innersten, und sie ist vor allem ein Seelenzustand, auf dessen äußerster Spitze der Gedanke nur wie eine Blüte sitzt." ~ Robert Musil
49. "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." ~ Robert Musil
50. "A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance." ~ Robert Musil
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Christopher Tietjens is a sad sorry bastard who just refuses to get out of the way on the oncoming train of change."
Author: Ada Maria Soto

What Did Robert Musil Talk About?

Wit
Thin
Ten
Lit
Hen
Ally
Tan
Con
Per
Here
Ring
Die
Thou
Act
Use
Sin
Lie
Era
Self
End
Son
She
Los
Hand
Ear
Read
Once
Mean
Sit
Bee
Keep
Hey
Does
Tie
Seem
Sing
Idea
Pen
Order
Full
Themselves
Less
Ways
Reason
Reality
Soul
Low
Understand
Round
Though

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