Robert Musil

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

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.

— Robert Musil

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

— Robert Musil

Sie litten alle unter der Angst, keine Zeit für alles zu haben, und wussten nicht, dass Zeit haben nichts anderes heißt, als keine Zeit für alles zu haben.

— Robert Musil

Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.

— Robert Musil

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.

— Robert Musil

With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. … As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.

— Robert Musil

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

— Robert Musil

For what do we do on the Last Day, when the works of humankind are weighted, with three treatises on formic acid, or even thirty? On the other hand, what do we know about the Last Day, if we don't even know what can be done with formic acid between now and then?

— Robert Musil

Believe me, what makes the human being truly free, and what takes away his freedom, what gives him true bliss and what destroys it, isn't subject to 'progress'--it is something every genuinely alive person knows perfectly well in his own heart, if he will just listen to it!

— Robert Musil

At home these men’s works [Kant, Schiller, Goethe] were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this bookcase was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor. It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about.

— Robert Musil

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