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Robert Musil Biography

Robert Musil (German: [ˈmuːzɪl] or [ˈmuːsɪl]; 6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels.

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Robert Musil Quotes

and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.

Experience, Night, Perhaps, Religious, Struggle

. . . 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.

Appear, Collectively, Numbers, People, Temptation, World

the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress

Intellectual, Needs, Progress, Restricting, Spiritual

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.

Fire, Living, Person, Soul, Spark, Sparks

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.

Fine, Ideas, Long, Mean, Men

His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.

Art, Curves, Fall, Figures, Tissue

You see how wrong I go, how ridiculous I'm making myself in your eyes by keeping on guessing wrong like this! Doesn't that help you to come out with it? Come on now!

Come, Eye, Guessing, Keeping, Making, Ridiculous

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.

Condition, Conveyance, Jobs, Reading, Work, Writing

One does what one is; one becomes what one does.

Becomes, Doe

. . . the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

Age, Art, Intellectual, Like

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.

Civilized, Democracy, Democrats, Humane, People, Voting

We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.

Flash, Flower, Genius, Hands, Remains, Understanding

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

Form, Pounding, Skin, Skins, Surface, Things

But how do I get to having to write a book?. . . It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

Book, Having, Inkwell, Mother, Writing

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.

Lying, Taken, Decay, Lie, Becomes, Take

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

Progress, Stop, Wonderful, Would Be

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.

Average, Ideas, Men, Possibilities, Sum

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.

Centre, Drew, People, Petrify, Running, Together

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

Certain, Gives, Giving, Men, Reality

Clothes, when abstracted from the flow of present time and their transmogrifying function on the human body, and seen as forms in themselves, are strange tubes and excrescences worthy of being classed with such facial decorations as the ring through the nose or the lip-stretching disk. But how enchanting they become when seen togetherwith the qualities they bestow on their wearer! What happens then is no less than the infusion, into some tangled lines on a piece of paper, of the meaning of a great word.

Clothes, Decorations, Human, Quality, Tangled, Worthy

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