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

More quotes by Robert Musil

Image
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
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
[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
Robert Musil
Image
The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
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
One does what one is one becomes what one does.
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
... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.
Robert Musil
Image
Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?
Robert Musil
Image
... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
Robert Musil
Image
There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
Robert Musil
Image
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
Life is to blame for everything.
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
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