Skip to content

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.

— Robert Musil The Confusions of Young Törless (1906)

Another quote →

Topics

Books

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)

All Robert Musil quotes →

You may also like

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

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.