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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!

— Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities (1930)

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More quotes by Robert Musil

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)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Musil (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.