The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

They had unexpectedly become as close as two people who have loved each other for a long time, who in fact almost no longer love each other, without actually going through love.

newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public’s great benefit,

chewed out from head to foot, in dusty boots,

happiness can do wonders for a man’s latent possibilities.

the noise that broke apart for a few seconds to let out one specific sound,

the risks and disappointments of love.

you can always depend on something important coming of the fact that somebody attaches importance to it.

the really rotten, vile things that go on happen not because someone is doing them but because we are letting them happen.

The luminous, swaying box in which he was riding seemed to be a machine in which several hundred kilos of people were being rattled around, by way of being processed into “the future.”

we care too little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it is happening,

most people or, bluntly speaking, the average sort, whose minds are stimulated without their being able to create, long to act out their own selves. These are of course the same people who are so likely to find, going on inside them, something “unutterable”—truly a word that says it all for them and that is the clouded screen upon which whatever they say appears vaguely magnified,

a heart turned fifty is a tough muscle, not so easily stretched as that of a twenty-year-old in love’s springtime,

bent over a sheet of paper that was ready to reflect his views, he joyfully abandoned himself to a metaphoric expression of his convictions, only a small portion of which had any basis in fact, while the greater part was a billowing cloud of words

the residual element of irrationality that the informed observer can detect everywhere in life;

Every human nose instantly smells the subtle scent of independence, the habit of command, the habit of always choosing the best of everything for oneself, the whiff of misanthropy, and the unwavering sense of responsibility that goes with power, that rises up, in short, from a large and secure income. Everyone can see at a glance that such a person is nourished and daily renewed by quintessential cosmic forces.

Only people with no money imagine riches as a dream fulfilled; those who have it never tire of explaining to those who do not have it how much trouble it gives them.

such things as ideas, knowledge, loyalty, talent, prudence, and the like can be bought because they are available in abundance, while the ability to make use of them presupposes qualities given only to the few

money, the nature of which demands increase,

to give it away quietly for purposes and people who are of no use to it is simply to commit murder most foul upon one’s money.

The moon probably rises far more beautifully behind the flowerpot on the windowsill of a lovesick young girl than it does over Asia.”

Possibly the very people I can’t stand are carrying out what I once hoped to accomplish myself.

I don’t believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.

an old bachelor always made himself a bit ridiculous by a late marriage, much like a couple having a baby for their silver wedding anniversary.

And the businessman, even as he rules the world, respects kingship, aristocracy, and the church as pillars of the irrational.

Money is power in the abstract,

Capitalism, as the organization of egotism based on a hierarchy in which one’s rank depends on one’s capacity for getting money, is simply the greatest and yet the most humane order we have been able to devise,

it is much harder to hold aloof from something everyone else is doing than to refuse to be first in line.

as long as one believed in religion, one could defenestrate a good Christian or a pious Jew from any story in the castle of hope or prosperity, and he would always land on his spiritual feet, as it were, because all religions included in their view of life an irrational, incalculable element they called God’s inscrutable will. Whenever a man could not make sense of things, he merely had to remember this rogue element in the equation, and his spirit could rub its hands with satisfaction, as it were.

Everyone has some such method of jockeying one’s psychological accounts in one’s own favor, aiming at a minimum balance of pleasure that should ordinarily get one through the day.

all the magnetic fields of the cosmos affect those of the earth without anyone noticing it, because the result is simply whatever happens on earth.

Four walls and an iron door are nothing when you can freely walk in and out. Bars on an unfamiliar window are nothing special, and a plank bed or wooden table always in its place is quite in order. It’s only when a man can’t do what he wants with them that something crazy happens.

The effect of a great man who is his own man is like that of a great beauty; deny it, and it is a punctured balloon, or a Greek statue on which someone has put a hat. A beautiful woman loses her looks when she ceases to please, and a great man when ignored may become an even greater one but ceases to be a great public figure.

Intuition was fashionable at the time with all those who could not justify what they did by logic;

Actually, she found the well-scrubbed and scented pagans more attractive, but taking sides with the Christians was a sacrifice one owed to one’s character.

If nowadays anyone told a story of God speaking to him personally, seizing him painfully by the hair to lift him up to Himself, or slipping into his breast in some numinous, intensely sweet way, no one would take any of these details embodying the experience literally, least of all God’s professional functionaries, who, as children of a scientific age, feel an understandable horror of being compromised by hysterical and maniacal adherents.

Ulrich was not speaking as a scientist at all but was saying far more than he would have been prepared to defend,

She felt like an assassin who has started out with none too clear an idea of what it would be like, and is then swept by circumstances into a state in which the actual pistol shot or the glitter of vitriol drops flying through the air no longer adds much to the excitement.

she had almost become hardened to the fact that wherever she might turn, the pudgy little General popped up like a nightmare, as if sponsored by some sinister forces.