170 Quotes by Robert Musil

How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

Alles, was wir denken, ist entweder Zuneigung oder Abneigung.

The body of reality is always richer than the mere outline sketch we call principles.

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.

His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. 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 that 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.

He felt himself, in a way, torn between two worlds: a solid, bourgeois world where ultimately everything was ordered and rational, as he was accustomed to from home, and an untrammelled one full of darkness, blood, and undreamt-of surprises.

Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one’s ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them.

Youth’s scorn and its revolt against the established order, youth’s readiness for everything that is heroic, whether it is self-sacrifice or crime, its fiery seriousness and its unsteadiness – all this is nothing but its fluttering attempts to fly.

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.