Quote

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

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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
Effects
Piecemeal
Around
Playful
Doe
Patch
Together
Forming
Reason
Patches
Never
Ease
Thinking
Connections
Kaleidoscopic
Life
Effect
Laboriously

More quotes by 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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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
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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.
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Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
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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
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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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One does what one is one becomes what one does.
Robert Musil
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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.
Robert Musil
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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.
Robert Musil
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Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?
Robert Musil
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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
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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.
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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Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth later we can often sense a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.
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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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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the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Robert Musil
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Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
Robert Musil
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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
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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