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 determination intellectual
Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.
book unusual cases
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.
reality awakening would-be
It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.
sacrifice endure impression
Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
fall learning crystals
The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.
feelings intellectual connections
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
men average ideas
It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.
numbers people temptation
... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.
beautiful art expression
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.
religious struggle night
and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.
people voting democracy
That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.
differences healthy facts
The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
art layers
Layer by layer art strips life bare.
reality possibility ifs
If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.