Quote

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

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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
Art
Loves
Beautiful
Expression
Thought
Becomes
Nothing
Loved
Something
Came
Beauty
Fact
Defined
Facts
Thus

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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...love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.
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Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
Robert Musil
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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
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There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
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[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
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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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... 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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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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the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Robert Musil
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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
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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
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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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Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
Robert Musil
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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
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One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
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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... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
Robert Musil