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
book reading perspective
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.
art intellectual age
... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.
bridges frozen pages
... the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it.
men together world
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!
blame life-is
Life is to blame for everything.
cutting feelings way
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.
thinking together ease
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.
men play want-something
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?
men suffering damage
A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
believe school errors
It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
religious feet people
...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.
virtue granted hours
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.
numbers add brilliant
[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
attention here-and-there found
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.