Musil Quotes

“…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings. ”
― Robert Musil

“Les idéaux ont de curieuses qualités, entre autres celle de se transformer brusquement en absurdité quand on s'essaie de s'y conformer strictement.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“We don’t have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.”
― Robert Musil

“Chaque vérité éternelle existe en double, en multiples exemplaires.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Musil actually read the Logical Syntax and considered proposing it (somewhat ironically) as the ‘best new book of the year’ of 1934 in response to a query from a literary magazine.”
― A.W. Carus, Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment