Quote

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

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
Intellectual
Mathematician
Ought
Lesson
Existence
Significant
Lying
Mathematics
Future
Field
Analogy
Lessons
Mathematicians
Fields
Therein
Lies
Analogies

More quotes by Robert Musil

Image
Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
Robert Musil
Image
One does what one is one becomes what one does.
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
the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
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
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
True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
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
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
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
Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.
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
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
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
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
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