Robert Musil Quotes

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.

I do wish I ruled the world, I think it'd be a better place.

Everything that you can imagine is going on is going on.

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

I always said that in a country where a legislature, its sessions limited by statute, could alter reality by turning back the clock (I actually saw this done, once, with a long pole pushing on the hour hand), any travesty was possible. I see nothing lately to prove me wrong.

The two super-powers cannot divide the world into their oyster.

I like that feeling of discombobulation that comes in creating an absurd world that doesn't make sense.

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

I have a certain avoidance of reality that makes fantasy an ideal choice for me.

Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.

If I ruled the world Imagine that...

Sometimes, when I can't get to sleep, I imagine all the rules I'd invent if I ever got to be in charge of the world.

We have ... dreamed so much and observed so little, that our imaginations have grown larger than the world we live in, and our judgments have dwindled down to a point.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

Humanity is at a fork in the road and we can no longer stand there staring at the map pondering which direction to take. It is hardly a choice, after all. One Road leads to a global fascist dictatorship that would control every aspect of our lives, including our thoughts. The other will open the door to freedom and potential on a scale never experienced in the 'world' as we have known it. Hard one, isn't it? A choice between a prison and a paradise?

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be it would. You see?

It has been the dream of very few men to rule the entire world. - Dr. Grief