Quote

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer but what should a man do who wants something in between?

Robert Musil

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Musil
Age: 61 †
Born: 1880
Born: November 6
Died: 1942
Died: April 15
Author
Engineer
Essayist
Librarian
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Celovec
Giving
Becomes
Something
Wants
Men
Free
Become
Truth
Give
Subjectivity
May
Scientist
Play
Writer

More quotes by Robert Musil

Image
... 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.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
Robert Musil
Image
... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.
Robert Musil
Image
And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
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
Image
True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.
Robert Musil
Image
Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
Robert Musil
Image
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
Robert Musil
Image
... 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
Image
Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
Robert Musil