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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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Robert Musil
Age: 61 †
Born: 1880
Born: November 6
Died: 1942
Died: April 15
Author
Engineer
Essayist
Librarian
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Celovec
World
Temptation
People
Wherever
Appear
Numbers
Propensity
Particular
Collectively
Everything
Individually
Great
Forbidden
Would
Permit

More quotes by 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!
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[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
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Life is to blame for everything.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
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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
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the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Robert Musil
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One does what one is one becomes what one does.
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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... 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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... 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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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
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There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
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