Robert Musil
Robert Musil was an Austrian novelist, playwright, and essayist who wrote in the German language, working also as an engineer and librarian over the course of his life.
He was born on November 6, 1880, in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, and went on to study at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His writing career produced works across several forms, including the novel The Confusions of Young Törless and the collection The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. He received both the Kleist Prize and the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize in recognition of his work. His most substantial work was the novel The Man Without Qualities. He died on April 15, 1942, in Geneva, far from the Austria whose citizenship he held.
His output across novels, plays, and essays reflects a sustained engagement with multiple literary forms. The Man Without Qualities stands as the most notable work associated with his name, and alongside his earlier fiction such as The Confusions of Young Törless and his essay collection The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, it places him as a writer who moved between narrative and discursive modes throughout his career.
Quotes by Robert Musil
Robert Musil's insights on:
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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?
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.
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.