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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

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Robert Musil
Age: 61 †
Born: 1880
Born: November 6
Died: 1942
Died: April 15
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Celovec
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More quotes by Robert Musil

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One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
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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Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?
Robert Musil
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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
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There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
Robert Musil
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... 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
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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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Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
Robert Musil
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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
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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.
Robert Musil
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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.
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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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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the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
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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Life is to blame for everything.
Robert Musil
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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
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But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
Robert Musil
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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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[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
Robert Musil