Robert Musil
Layer by layer art strips life bare.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Beauty
Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?Collection: Art
Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.
If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.
The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.
It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
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.
A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.
Life is to blame for everything.
It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.
It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.
Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.
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!
And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Hands
One does what one is; one becomes what one does.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Differences
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.Collection: Skins
...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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Thinking
... 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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Fire
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.Collection: Age
We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.Collection: Soul
... we engage in politics because we don't know anything. This is clearly revealed in the way we go about it. Our parties exist from a fear of theory. The voter fears that one idea can always be contradicted by another. Therefore the parties reciprocally defend themselves against the few old ideas they have inherited. They don't live from what they promise, but from frustrating the promises of others. This is their silent community of interests.Collection: Party
True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.Collection: People
Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?Collection: Art
The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.Collection: Fall
... 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.Collection: Numbers
Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Men
Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Lying
Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Air
That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.Collection: People
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.Collection: Dream
the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progressCollection: Spiritual
You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody's been living for them, not even for a single hour.Collection: Virtue
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Thinking