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
stupid mean men
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.
clothes tangled quality
Clothes, when abstracted from the flow of present time and their transmogrifying function on the human body, and seen as forms in themselves, are strange tubes and excrescences worthy of being classed with such facial decorations as the ring through the nose or the lip-stretching disk. But how enchanting they become when seen togetherwith the qualities they bestow on their wearer! What happens then is no less than the infusion, into some tangled lines on a piece of paper, of the meaning of a great word.
use world want
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.
army people world
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
world invisible this-world
There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
reality men giving
And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.
running people together
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.
men wicked machines
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.
hands clothes stupidity
Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.
agreement order people
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.
soul littles matter
We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul,
thinking feelings limits
With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.
mother book writing
But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
luxury today reason
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.