The Man Without Qualities Quotes

“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

“Love dissolves truth like wine the pearl.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume II

“A person never finds himself a total coward, because if something frightens him he runs just far enough away to consider himself a hero again!”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume II

“Feelings and thoughts become lasting only with each other's help, in their totality; they must somehow be aligned with each other and carry each other onward. And by every available means, through drugs, liquor, fantasies, hypnosis, faith, conviction, often even through the simplifying effect of stupidity, man is always trying to achieve a condition like it. He believes in ideas not because they are sometimes true but because he needs to believe; because he has to keep his feelings in order. Because he must have an illusion to stop up the gap between the walls of his life, through which his feelings would otherwise fly off in every direction.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume II

“A man of knowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will be revealed only at the end of time. Science is amoral. All our glorious thrusting of ourselves into the Unknown gets us out of the habit of being personally concerned with our conscience; in fact, it doesn't even give us the satisfaction of taking our conscience entirely seriously.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume II