{"author":"Robert Musil","author_id":"Robert+Musil","total_quotes":18,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["genius","stupidity"],"id":6783,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["morality"],"id":65089,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["librarians","library"],"id":67485,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"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.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["dream","reality"],"id":73567,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"Layer by layer art strips life bare.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["life","bare","layer "],"id":148751,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["fantastic","fantasy"],"id":192668,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly responsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["life","responsibility"],"id":205925,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"…. 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.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["age","life","musil"],"id":229075,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["lying","truth"],"id":253639,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"},{"text":"A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance.","author":"Robert Musil","tags":["daily-life","energy"],"id":264846,"author_id":"Robert+Musil"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":18,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}