Quotes from Robert Musil

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sie litten alle unter der Angst, keine Zeit für alles zu haben, und wussten nicht, dass Zeit haben nichts anderes heißt, als keine Zeit für alles zu haben.

Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - it comes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts, because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not being able to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in your own any longer than you have to.

a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.

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.

And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.

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.

I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains.

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.

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: Why do you keep on pushing me away? The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart.

In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn't hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is.

Augen sind Hände, die man lebenslang nicht wäscht; so behalten sie die schmutzige Gewohnheit, alles anzurühren.