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Robert Musil Quotes
1880–1942 Austria
Robert Mathias Edler von Musil (6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian writer. His unfinished long novel The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels.
Austria Novelists Playwrights Short story writers Also known as: The Man Without Qualities
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10 quotes
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
Mathematical man (1913)
We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.
Helpless Europe (1922)
Modernism is the attempt to permeate religion with middle-class reason.
Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.
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.
Mathematical man (1913)
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.
Mathematical man (1913)
[T]he restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress...
The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics (1913)
So far as happiness is concerned it matters very little what one wants; the main thing is that one should get it. Besides, zoology makes it clear that a sum of reduced individuals may very well form a totality of genius.
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!
The Man Without Qualities (1930)
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.
The Confusions of Young Törless (1906)
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