Status Updates From The Man Without Qualities (...

An idea after an idea. It keeps getting better and better!

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of flavor sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality -- even in relation to himself -- that one day he appears to himself as man without qualities.

Enquiry as to the Drafting of a Guiding Resolution and the Ascertaining of the Wishes of all Participant Circles of the Population with reference to the Jubilee Celebrations of the Seventieth Anniversary of His Majesty's Ascension to the Throne...

(or was she, perhaps, his beloved? Ulrich wondered and decided that the most probable thing was something like beloved plus friend divided by two)

realization always attracts me less than non-realisation...our history is made up of the fact that every time we fulfill just a little of an idea, in our delight we leave the greater part of it undone.

Nothing, incidentally, is more typical than one's involuntary experience of learned and rational attempts to provide a commentary on such great essayists, to transform the living wisdom, even as it is, into a theory of life, and so to extract some 'content' from the motion of those who were moved ... The teachings of the inspired crumble into dust in the rationality of the uninspired.

But still, if one is set down in the dark, one mustn't be like a child and whistle to keep one's courage up. And it's only whistling to keep one's courage up if one behaves as if one knew how to behave in this world here below.

People liked listening to him because it was so nice that a man who had so many ideas also had money.

[The mind] knows that the mucous membrane of the lips is related to the mucous membrane of the intestine, but knows too that the humility of those lips is related to the humility of all that is saintly.

The casual mention of a hair on a nose weighs more than the most significant thought.

Since the 2nd December naturally cannot by any power be moved ahead of the 15th July...

if mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger.

The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper is far greater than that of experiencing it; in other words, it is in the realm of the abstract that the more important things happen in these times, and it is the unimportant that happens in real life.