Robert Musil > Quotes

“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, The Man without Qualities

“One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.”
― 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

“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

“His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect—why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities—yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context—nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is—some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.”
― Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

“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, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.”
― 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

“At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: "Why do you keep on pushing me away?" The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.”
― 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, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“Sie litten alle unter der Angst, keine Zeit für alles zu haben, und wussten nicht, dass Zeit haben nichts anderes heißt, als keine Zeit für alles zu haben.”
― 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, Die Schwärmer

“[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“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, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“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, The Man without Qualities

“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, Die Schwärmer

“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, Die Schwärmer

“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

“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, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber.”
― Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Torless

“Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.”
― 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, Die Schwärmer

“It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves.
And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream – the life that now lay open before him.”
― Robert Musil

“Unsere Zeit ist eine Zeit der Erfüllung, und Erfüllungen sind immer Enttäuschungen.”
― 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, The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

“Augen sind Hände, die man lebenslang nicht wäscht; so behalten sie die schmutzige Gewohnheit, alles anzurühren.”
― Robert Musil, Die Schwärmer

“Jeder Mensch kommt auf die Welt mit Kräften für die unerhörtesten Erlebnisse. Die Gesetze binden ihn nicht. Aber dann lässt ihn das Leben immer zwischen zwei Möglichkeiten wählen, und immer fühlt er: eine ist nicht darunter; immer eine, die unerfundene dritte Möglichkeit. Und man tut alles, was man will, und hat nie getan, was man gewollt hat. Schließlich wird man talentlos.”
― Robert Musil, Die Schwärmer

“Alles, was wir denken, ist entweder Zuneigung oder Abneigung.”
― Robert Musil

“[...] jedes einzelne war hässlich, und alles zusammen war Glück.”
― Robert Musil, Drei Frauen

“he had to stand by while there proliferated in his own house such concepts as “the art of living thought” “the graph of spiritual growth” and “action on the wing”. he discovered that a biweekly ”hour of purification” was held regularly under his roof. he demanded an explanation. it turned out that what they meant by this was reading the poems of Stefan George together. Leo Fischel searched his old encyclopedia in vain for the poet’s name. but what irritated him most of all, old-style liberal that he was, was that these green pups referred to all the high government officials, bank presidents, and leading university figures in the Parallel Campaign as “puffed-up little men”. then there were the world-weary airs they gave themselves, complaining that the times had become devoid of great ideas, if there was anyone left who was ready for great ideas. that even “humanity” had become a mere buzzword, as far as they were concerned, and that only “the nation” or, as they called it, “folk and folkways” still really had any meaning.

wiser than their years, they disdained “lust” and “the inflated lie about the crude enjoyment of animal existence” as they called it, but talked so much about supersensuality and mystical desire that the startled listener reacted willy-nilly by feeling a certain tenderness for sensuality and physical desires, and even Leo Fischel had to admit that the unbridled ardor of their language sometimes made the listener feel the roots of their ideas shooting down his legs, though he disapproved, because in his opinion great ideas were meant to be uplifting.”
― Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

“His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.”
― Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

“... 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

“Man handelte in diesem Land - und mitunter bis zu den höchsten Graden der Leidenschaft und ihren Folgen - immer anders, als man dachte, oder dachte anders, als man handelte.”
― Robert Musil