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All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

Robert Musil

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Robert Musil
Age: 61 †
Born: 1880
Born: November 6
Died: 1942
Died: April 15
Author
Engineer
Essayist
Librarian
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Celovec
Alone
Actually
Stills
Together
Lifes
Still
Sixth
Without
Paintings
Men
Creation
World
Painting

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... nothing is more human than substituting the quantity of words and actions for their character. But using imprecise words is very similar to using lots of words, for the more imprecise a word is, the greater the area it covers.
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In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.
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We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.
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The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.
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Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.
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Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
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A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
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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.
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... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.
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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.
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I also believe that few people remain completely untouched by the thought that instead of the life they lead there might also be another, where all actions proceed from a very personal state of excitement. Where actions have meanings, not just causes. And where a person, to use a trivial word, is happy, and not just nervously tormenting himself.
Robert Musil
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... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
Robert Musil
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The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
Robert Musil
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One does what one is one becomes what one does.
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One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
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Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
Robert Musil
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To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying.
Robert Musil
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With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.
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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.
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... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.
Robert Musil