170 Quotes by Robert Musil

For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly responsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.

He was in that familiar state - not that the occasion mattered to seriously to him -- of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit.

The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.

Er fühlte einen unsäglichen Widerwillen, mit diesen Resten seiner selbst in Berührung zu kommen.

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.

[A]lles ist moralisch, aber die Moral selbst ist nicht moralisch!

[Unser Leben] ist unüberwindlich verworren nur dann, wen man an sich denkt; aber in dem Augenblick, wo man nicht an sich denkt, sondern sich fragt, wie man einem anderen helfen könne, ist es sehr einfach.

We don’t have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

[D]iese skeptische Gegenwart glaubt weder an Gott noch an die Humanität, weder an Kronen noch Sittlichkeit - oder sie glaubt an alles zusammen, was auf das gleiche hinauskommt.