Robert Musil

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

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

“Truth is not what we discover, but what we create.”

“The soul is that which denies the body. For example, that which refuses to run when the body would gladly run away.”

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

“A man of action has a destiny, but a man of thoughts has a biography.”

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

“Progress is the law of life; man is not man as yet.”

“What is called a 'world-view' is, primarily, a view of the world from a specific standpoint.”

“There are truths, but no truth.”

“Order is a kind of compulsion. And what is compulsion? The fear of the open, the bottomless, the free.”

“Genius is the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”

“In the end, one can only experience in the world that which one has in oneself.”

“A human being is a paltry thing, a mere point in the universal chaos, a nothingness that has become conceited.”

“Every great man is a unique absurdity.”

“One must be as wary of images as of ideologies.”

“To be is to have a history.”