Quote

... 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

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
Around
Corners
Soul
Contact
Find
Souls
Oceans
Nothing
Mere
Dwelling
Play
Ocean
Continents
Children
Modern
Bridge
Impossible
Corner
Child
Bridges

More quotes by Robert Musil

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?
Robert Musil
Image
The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
Robert Musil
Image
A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
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
One does what one is one becomes what one does.
Robert Musil
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
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
[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
Robert Musil
Image
There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
Robert Musil
Image
Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?
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
... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
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