Robert Musil

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!

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.

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

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.

The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.