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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.

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
Singing
Huddled
Tomorrow
Bunkers
Started
Premonition
Felt
Kitsch
Comrade
Melancholy
Hung
Air

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A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
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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.
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Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
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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.
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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.
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What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.
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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!
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One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
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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.
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There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
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... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
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... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.
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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.
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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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Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
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[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
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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.
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Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
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