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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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Engineer
Essayist
Librarian
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Celovec
Free
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Simply
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Reading
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More quotes by Robert Musil
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
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
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
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
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
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
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
Robert Musil
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
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
Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
Robert Musil
... 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
Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
Robert Musil
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
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
A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
Robert Musil
the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Robert Musil
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
Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?
Robert Musil
... 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
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
Robert Musil