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Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.

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
Stills
Afford
Still
Using
Wants
Days
Brain
Anyone
Comes
Experience
Brains

More quotes by Robert Musil

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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.
Robert Musil
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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.
Robert Musil
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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.
Robert Musil
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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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Life is to blame for everything.
Robert Musil
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Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?
Robert Musil
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One does what one is one becomes what one does.
Robert Musil
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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.
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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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.
Robert Musil
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True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.
Robert Musil
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Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.
Robert Musil
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Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
Robert Musil
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Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
Robert Musil
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A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
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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... for the modern soul, for which it is mere child's play to bridge oceans and continents, there is nothing so impossible as to find the contact with the souls dwelling just around the corner.
Robert Musil
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Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
Robert Musil
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Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.
Robert Musil
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One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil