Robert Musil Quotes & Sayings

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people's goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know. — Robert Musil

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul, — Robert Musil

The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude. — Robert Musil

Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - it
comes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts,
because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not being
able to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in your
own any longer than you have to. — Robert Musil

In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

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! — Robert Musil

The one thing that remains permanently behind the times, especially because it prides itself on its steadfastness, is the human heart, most of all that of the conscientious man. The mind is never so hard, dry, and twisted as when it has a slight chronic heart condition. — Robert Musil

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something. — Robert Musil

It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration. — Robert Musil

In the right circumstances, a man can help himself by writing a book about his point, or a pamphlet, or at least a letter to the editor, thereby putting his protest on the historical record, which is marvelously comforting even if nobody reads it. Usually, however, it can be counted on to attract the attention of a few readers who assure the author that he is a new Copernicus, whereupon they introduce themselves as unrecognized Newtons. This custom of picking points out of each other's fur is widespread and a great comfort, but it is without lasting effect because the participants soon fall to quarreling and find themselves isolated again. — Robert Musil

A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage. — Robert Musil

For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled [ ... ] prevent[ing] precisely what should be his true fulfillment. — Robert Musil

All professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods. — Robert Musil

I am not only convinced that what I say is false, but also that what one might say against it is false. Despite this, one must begin to talk about it. In such a case the truth lies not in the middle, but rather all around, like a sack, which, with each new opinion one stuffs into it, changes its form, and becomes more and more firm. — Robert Musil

Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven.
The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you'd think it was a flashlight.Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around. — Robert Musil

We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone. — Robert Musil

And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong. — Robert Musil

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? — Robert Musil

Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands between that person and death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. "Losing one's head," language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience. — Robert Musil

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? — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

People were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that has always been the image of a lunatic. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

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

[ ... ] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit. — Robert Musil

Now I have something to tell you," her brother said. "Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play. — Robert Musil

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 — Robert Musil

Everything we feel and do is somehow oriented "lifeward," and the least deviation away from this direction toward something beyond is difficult or alarming. This is true even of the simple act of walking: one lifts one's center of gravity, pushes it forward, and lets it drop again - and the slightest change, the merest hint of shrinking from this letting-oneself-drop-into-the-future, or even stopping to wonder at it - and one can no longer stand upright! — Robert Musil

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic. — Robert Musil

What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams and fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reaching their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and unhappier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as if we were characters in a novel who have met in the pages of a book. Let's in any case leave off all the fatty tissue that plumps up reality. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying. — Robert Musil

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success. — Robert Musil

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

Such elderly people were in the habit of saying that he simply had no will-power; but it might just as well have been said that he had all his life long only been a many-sided dilettante. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop. — Robert Musil

There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart. — Robert Musil

One does what one is; one becomes what one does. — Robert Musil

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility. — 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. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. — Robert Musil

And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity. — Robert Musil

At this moment he wished to be a man without qualities. But this is probably not so very different from what other people sometimes feel too. After all, by the time they have reached the middle of their life's journey few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change any more. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything's having come about as it has. — Robert Musil

But how do I get to having to write a book? ... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell! — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

When one's married for so long, always walking on four feet and always
breathing double breaths and thinking every thought twice through and
the time between the main things is packed double full with minor
details - then, sometimes, naturally, one yearns like an arrow for one
whole space thin as air. And you start up in the night, terrified by
your own breathing, which had just been going along as evenly without
you. But you don't rise up free - or even really as far as your knees
- not once. You strike a match. And there's one of you right there,
wrapped in flesh. Only then is it love. — Robert Musil

The restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress — Robert Musil

The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes. — Robert Musil

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

A motorcyclist rode down the empty street, arms and legs rounded in an O, and came back up with the sound of thunder; his face displayed seriousness of a child who attributes the utmost importance to his howls — Robert Musil

For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective. — Robert Musil

Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art? — Robert Musil

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument — Robert Musil

Life is to blame for everything. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [ ... ] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage. — Robert Musil

For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire. — Robert Musil

You see how wrong I go, how ridiculous I'm making myself in your eyes by keeping on guessing wrong like this! Doesn't that help you to come out with it? Come on now! — Robert Musil

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

Air and earth form an anthill traversed, level upon level, by roads live with traffic. Air trains, ground trains, underground trains, people mailed through tubes special-delivery, and chains of cars race along horizontally, while express elevators pump masses of people vertically from one traffic level to another; at the junctions, people leap from one vehicle to the next, instantly sucked in and snatched away by the rhythm of it, which makes a syncope, a pause, a little gap of twenty seconds during which a word might be hastily exchanged with someone else. Questions and answers synchronize like meshing gears; everyone has only certain fixed tasks. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the
right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else;
and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide
semi-circle: alone. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. — Robert Musil

In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really know she had: a soul.
What's that? It is easy to define negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

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

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. — Robert Musil

A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance. — Robert Musil

His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

There is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both. — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one! — Robert Musil

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. — Robert Musil

The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end. — Robert Musil

Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He
was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine
known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility.
These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health
but also have a substandard disease, Nature has a peculiar prefer-
ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus,
she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the
grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe-
cility and sanity. — Robert Musil

... . by the time they have reached the middle of their life's journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything's coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people's lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them — Robert Musil

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 together
with 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. — Robert Musil

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

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. — Robert Musil

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

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. — Robert Musil

I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records. — Robert Musil

Man is indisputably endowed with reason; the problem is only how he uses his reason in the company of others. — Robert Musil

An impractical man
which he not only seems to be, but really is
will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea. — Robert Musil

For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly responsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination. — Robert Musil

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! — Robert Musil