The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic

by Robert Musil

In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn’t hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is.

At night a man has only his nightshirt on, and right underneath that is his character.

a prickling like the awareness of nothingness when one stands on the summit of the highest mountain peak for miles around.

Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposites when one tries to live up to them.

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.

Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by contrast is lighthearted.

Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality.”

Who has never felt a nasty itch, looking at a beautifully glazed, luxuriantly curved vase, at the thought of smashing it to bits with a single blow of one’s stick? This temptation, raised to its full heroic bitterness—that nothing in life can be relied on unless it is firmly nailed down—is a basic feeling embedded in the sobriety of science; and though we are too respectable to call it the Devil, a whiff of burned horsehair still clings to it.