Robert Musil
Robert Musil
Robert Musilwas an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualitiesis generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth6 November 1880
CountryAustria
life happiness believe
I also believe that few people remain completely untouched by the thought that instead of the life they lead there might also be another, where all actions proceed from a very personal state of excitement. Where actions have meanings, not just causes. And where a person, to use a trivial word, is happy, and not just nervously tormenting himself.
life world emotion
... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
plato men what-matters
Wordsworth's particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time was--to Plato and who else? The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!
children ocean bridges
... for the modern soul, for which it is mere child's play to bridge oceans and continents, there is nothing so impossible as to find the contact with the souls dwelling just around the corner.
character talking stupidity
... nothing is more human than substituting the quantity of words and actions for their character. But using imprecise words is very similar to using lots of words, for the more imprecise a word is, the greater the area it covers.
men average years
It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.
dream woods hunters
... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.
beautiful pain birth
Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth; later we can often sense a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.
lying taken want
Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.
art air tools
Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?
air singing kitsch
Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.
average achievement genius
... the genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.
party ideas community
... we engage in politics because we don't know anything. This is clearly revealed in the way we go about it. Our parties exist from a fear of theory. The voter fears that one idea can always be contradicted by another. Therefore the parties reciprocally defend themselves against the few old ideas they have inherited. They don't live from what they promise, but from frustrating the promises of others. This is their silent community of interests.
jobs reading writing
Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.