"Wo ist dein Selbst zu finden? Immer in der tiefsten Bezauberung, die du erlitten hast. ... Die ganze Seele ist nie beisammen, außer in der Entzückung."

"Des Mannes Parze ist das Weib. Sie ist's, die seinen Lebensfaden spinnt – dunkel oder golden."

"Man's destiny is woman. She it is who spins the thread of his life—dark or golden."

"Die Moderne ist nur in unserem Wunsche und sie ist draußen überall, außer uns. Sie ist nicht in unserem Geiste. Sondern das ist die Qual und die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, die fieberische und schnaubende, daß das Leben dem Geiste entronnen ist. Das Leben hat sich gewandelt, bis in den letzten Grund, und wandelt sich immer noch aufs neue, alle Tage, rastlos und unstät. Aber der Geist blieb alt und starr und regte sich nicht und bewegte sich nicht und nun leidet er hilflos, weil er einsam ist und verlassen vom Leben."

"Es geht eine wilde Pein durch diese Zeit und der Schmerz ist nicht mehr erträglich. Der Schrei nach dem Heiland ist gemein und Gekreuzigte sind überall. Ist es das große Sterben, das über die Welt gekommen?"

"And the moral of the story?" I said to Severin when I put the manuscript down on the table. "That I was a donkey," he exclaimed without turning around, for he seemed to be embarrassed. "If only I had beaten her!" "A curious remedy," I exclaimed, "which might answer with your peasant-women-" "Oh, they are used to it," he replied eagerly, "but imagine the effect upon one of our delicate, nervous, hysterical ladies--" "But the moral?" "That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work." "At present we have only the choice of being hammer or anvil, and I was the kind of donkey who let a woman make a slave of him, do you understand?" "The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped."

"Men learned to speak in order to understand one another. Cultural languages have lost the ability to help men to advance beyond the most rudimentary level and attain understanding. It seems that the time has come to learn to be silent once again."

"I don’t know if it’s enough for a whole life, a man wants to enjoy many women, a man is different."

"sewing in itself is already in the women's blood."

"One suffers work, even if one enjoys doing it."

"There are photographs under the pistol, showing his mother genitals. These genitals make no perceptible impression on him, though it was through them that he first entered the world."

"often these women marry or they are ruined some other way."

"Happiness happens by chance, and is not a law or the logical consequences of actions."

"Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back."

"weak are defeated by the strong in the world of Nature. A reed by the north wind, for instance. And silence by the forest."

"Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end."

"Every man would like to possess all the women in the world, but a woman only wants the man she loves and to whom she is faithful."

"Beethoven’s sonatas, whether show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much vilified word ‘sonata means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new law in the highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa."

"The rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all."

"The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates."

"The most powerful urge known to Man is the urge to be free of manual labour. Any means that accomplishes that end is fine. Some people erroneously imagine that they have a birthright to non-manual work."

"Work is not a constraint.Man's activity provides his true fulfilment. True fulfilment however,can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave."

"There is no such thing as the universal ‘Man’ never has been, never will be, there is the worker and there is the one who exploits the worker and those who abet him."

"Money is unimportant, but it is reassuring to have it."

"Death the Laveller annihilates all distinctions."

"nothing comes of nothing after all."

"The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude."

"if someone has a fate, then it's a man, if someone gets a fate, then it's a woman."

"For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better."

"Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place."

"Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire t destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure."

"When discussing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach."

"Forewarned is forearmed."

"Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner."

"After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If you’re alone with nothing, and certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs!"

"Der Sensible muß verbrennen, dieser zarte Nachtfalter."

"The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable."

"Art and order, the relative that refuse to relate."

"For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise people will suppose the soul is done for."

"Don’t start anything you can’t finish."

"In this new era, what sets you free is knowledge, not work."

"In the case of a writer like Musil writing is often a graceful act,like a silvery fish leaping."

"Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature."

"We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils."

"In the old days people had no time to harm the environment because they were busy doing harm to themselves, in the War, for instance."

"Intellectuals will still go on emphasizing free will even when they’ve got nothing left to eat."

"The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions."

"Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted."

"Murder and assault are not lunacy; they are the logical conclusions if you live a life without an assured financial foundation."

"Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in."