Robert Musil Quotes & Sayings

“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.”

“Layer by layer art strips life bare.”

“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.”

“It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!”

“Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?”

“Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.”

“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.”

“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.”