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There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.
Robert Musil
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Robert Musil
Age: 61 †
Born: 1880
Born: November 6
Died: 1942
Died: April 15
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Engineer
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Librarian
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Celovec
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More quotes by Robert Musil
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.
Robert Musil
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
One does what one is one becomes what one does.
Robert Musil
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.
Robert Musil
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
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
An impractical man--which he not only seems to be, but really is--will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea.
Robert Musil
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
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
But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
Robert Musil
Wordsworth's particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time was--to Plato and who else? The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!
Robert Musil
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.
Robert Musil
Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.
Robert Musil
Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
Robert Musil
the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Robert Musil
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
Robert Musil
Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.
Robert Musil
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
The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.
Robert Musil
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
Robert Musil
