“It is a fundamental characteristic of civilization that man most profoundly mistrusts those living outside his own milieu, so that not only does the Teuton regard the Jew as an incomprehensible and inferior being, but the football player likewise so regards the piano player.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Prejudice
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“… the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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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
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Temptation
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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.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“What characterizes and defines our intellectual situation is precisely the wealth of contents that can no longer be mastered, the swollen facticity of knowledge (including moral facts), the spilling out of experience over the surfaces of nature, the impossibility of achieving an overview, the chaos of things that cannot be denied. We will perish from this, or overcome it by becoming a spiritually stronger type of human being.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance standsbetween that person and death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. “Losing one’s head,” language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper is far greater than that of experiencing it; in other words, it isin the realm of the abstract that the more important things happen in these times, and it is the unimportant that happens in real life.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“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
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Happiness
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“To the degree that respect for professors … has risen in our society, respect for writers has fallen. Today the professorial intellect has achieved its highest public standing since the world began, while writers have come to be called “men of letters,” by which is meant people who are prevented by some obscure infirmity from becoming competent journalists.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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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!”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreoverdiminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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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
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Don’t you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“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.”
Robert Musil
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
