Quotes from Robert Musil

Získali jsme skute?nost a pÃ…â"¢iÅ¡li jsme o sen.

Ein Mann, der die Wahrheit will, wird Gelehrter; ein Mann, der seine Subjektivität spielen lassen will, wird vielleicht Schriftsteller; was aber soll ein Mann tun, der etwas will, das dazwischen liegt?

Ich bin immer in einem Mann-Mannesverhältnis zu den sogenannten großen Ideen gestanden; vielleicht auch zu den mit Recht so genannten: Ich glaube mich nicht zur Unterordnung geboren, sie haben mich gereizt, sie zu stürzen und andere an ihrer Stelle zu setzen. Ja, vielleicht bin ich gerade von dieser Eifersucht zur Wissenschaft geführt worden, deren Gesetze man in Gemeinschaft sucht und auch nicht für unverbrüchlich ansieht.

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

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

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

Life is to blame for everything.

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

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!

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms…. Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.

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.

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

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.

The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

An impractical man--which he not only seems to be, but really is--will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea.

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

Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people's goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know.