Robert Musil Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“Life is to blame for everything.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.”