Elisabeth

“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its
justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a
sense of possibility.
Whoever has it does not say, for instance:
Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen;
but he invents:
Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen.
If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise.
[...]
Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood.
Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned
that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls,
or troublemakers.
Such fools are also called idealists by those who wish to praise them.
But all this clearly applies only to their weak subspecies, those
who cannot comprehend reality or who, in their melancholic condition,
avoid it. These are people in whom the lack of a sense of reality
is a real deficiency.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities