Top 80 Robert Musil Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.”

— Robert Musil

2. “Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.”

— Robert Musil

3. “One does what one is; one becomes what one does.”

— Robert Musil

4. “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.”

— Robert Musil

5. “Don’t you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?”

— Robert Musil

6. “One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.”

— Robert Musil

7. “Progress would be wonderful – if only it would stop.”

— Robert Musil

8. “Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.”

— Robert Musil

9. “Life is to blame for everything.”

— Robert Musil

10. “Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.”

— Robert Musil

11. “Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.”

— Robert Musil

12. “Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one’s ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them.”

— Robert Musil

13. “For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.”

— Robert Musil

14. “He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.”

— Robert Musil

15. “Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul’s point of view, entirely imaginary.”

— Robert Musil

16. “That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.”

— Robert Musil

17. “Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?”

— Robert Musil

18. “Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.”

— Robert Musil

19. “Layer by layer art strips life bare.”

— Robert Musil

20. “And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.”

— Robert Musil

21. “We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one’s big and second toes; there’s work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.”

— Robert Musil

22. “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.”

— Robert Musil

23. “Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people’s goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know.”

— Robert Musil

24. “It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.”

— Robert Musil

25. “All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!”

— Robert Musil

26. “He felt himself, in a way, torn between two worlds: a solid, bourgeois world where ultimately everything was ordered and rational, as he was accustomed to from home, and an untrammelled one full of darkness, blood, and undreamt-of surprises.”

— Robert Musil

27. “The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one’s pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.”

— Robert Musil

28. “The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.”

— Robert Musil

29. “Alles, was wir denken, ist entweder Zuneigung oder Abneigung.”

— Robert Musil

30. “Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth; later we can often sense a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.”

— Robert Musil

31. “There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.”

— Robert Musil

32. “The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.”

— Robert Musil

33. “It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.”

— Robert Musil

34. “It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.”

— Robert Musil

35. “Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.”

— Robert Musil

36. “If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.”

— Robert Musil

37. “He is capable of turning everything into anything – snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar, sugar into powder, and powder back into little drifts of snow – for all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not, which is doubtless proof that he cannot stand being anywhere for long, wherever he happens to be.”

— Robert Musil

38. “And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.”

— Robert Musil

39. “Youth’s scorn and its revolt against the established order, youth’s readiness for everything that is heroic, whether it is self-sacrifice or crime, its fiery seriousness and its unsteadiness – all this is nothing but its fluttering attempts to fly.”

— Robert Musil

40. “The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.”

— Robert Musil

41. “Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn’t take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.”

— Robert Musil

42. “Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.”

— Robert Musil

43. “Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.”

— Robert Musil

44. “Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.”

— Robert Musil

45. “A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?”

— Robert Musil

46. “Leute, die jederzeit zu sterben meinen, leben lang!”

— Robert Musil

47. “We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands – like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.”

— Robert Musil

48. “At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: “Why do you keep on pushing me away?” The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.”

— Robert Musil

49. “A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.”

— Robert Musil

50. “Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.”

— Robert Musil