Steve > Steve's Quotes

“Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed”
― E.F. Schumacher

“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.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“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, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“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, The Man Without Qualities: Volume II

“True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Man is indisputably endowed with reason; the problem is only how he uses his reason in the company of others.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“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 Man Without Qualities

“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, The Man Without Qualities

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez