"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)

"…. 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

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

"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

"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)

"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."
— Robert Musil

"Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man dann nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber."
— Robert Musil (The Confusions of Young Törless)

"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 (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß.)

"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)

"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)