Quotes from Robert Musil

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.

Man is indisputably endowed with reason; the problem is only how he uses his reason in the company of others.

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.

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought

Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can't afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.

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.

A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.

The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.

For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.

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

... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.

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.

A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.

The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.

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

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

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.

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.

It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.