Quotes from Robert Musil

Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.

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!

...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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.

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.

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.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.

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.

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.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!

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

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