Robert Musil Quotes

Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.

In an animated film you can do whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you should do everything you want.

You know, how much order is good? And when does order become too restrictive? Is a little bit of chaos okay, or is chaos always an evil force? I mean, these are questions that any kid who's ever been in a school cafeteria can relate to.

It's about living in a world with rules, or a world without rules.

If we do not discipline ourselves the world will do it for us.

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

Too much freedom can lead to the soul's decay.

Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

Sometimes I wish that there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after.

Under perfectly controlled conditions, man and every other organism behaves as it damn well pleases.

If we allow the passions of our men to get full command then indeed will this war become a reproach to the names of liberty and civilization.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There's just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

It's tough at times to not play.

Anyone who has a child knows the importance of not over-playing your hand. He was up all night playing some game on his smartphone and you feel like saying that if it happens again the phone is gone. Forever. Till he is old enough to buy his own. Till then he can have your old Nokia.

I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I've found there aren't any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me.

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

We tend to seek captivity because we are used to seeing freedom as something that has neither frontiers nor responsibilities.

Liberty begets license.

When the restrictions you have do not limit you, this is what we mean by practice.

Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom.

I told my son, who's 11, "Look, I don't care if you curse - it's other people that care." So we tried that experiment, and he just cursed all the time. And I was like, "All right, now I care that you curse." You try to have this idealized view, and it's like, "I don't care." But it's just going to cause chaos.

No man can take your freedom from you. They can limit your mobility, but that's about all they can do

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.