Quote

For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.

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
Would
Stand
Sane
Life
Fire
Mysterious
Living
Content
Declaring
Persons
Mental
Fanatics
Soul
Fool
Spark
Person
Highest
Pitch
Without
Worth
Sparks
Must
Cases
Fools

More quotes by Robert Musil

Image
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
Image
A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
Robert Musil
Image
the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Robert Musil
Image
Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
Robert Musil
Image
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
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
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
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
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
... 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
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
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
Image
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
Image
One does what one is one becomes what one does.
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
[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
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
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
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