170 Quotes by Robert Musil

A man can’t be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.

At this point he quit, right in the middle of an important and promising piece of work. He now saw his colleagues partly as relentless, obsessive public prosecutors and security chiefs of logic, and partly as opium eaters, addicts of some strange pale drug that filled their world with visions of numbers and abstract relations. “God help me,” he thought, “surely I never could have meant to spend all my life as a mathematician?

Things seemed to consist not of wood and stone but of some grandiose and infinitely tender immorality that, the moment it came in contact with him, turned into a deep moral shock.

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!

We have a tendency in this country to fall in love with noted personalities, like the drunks who throw their arms around a stranger’s neck, only to push him away again after a while, for equally obscure reasons.

You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody’s been living for them, not even for a single hour.

Every man is two people, and one hardly knows whether it is in the morning or in the evening that he reverts to his real self.

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.