Robert Musil Quotes

The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

Conduct is more convincing than language.

Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)

Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

The words that are coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it's so much different.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

We live and breathe words.

Your words will tell others what you think. Your actions will tell them what you believe.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

One paire of eares drawes dry an hundred tongues.

It's the periods and the commas that you have to forget about. The words never change, but the intonations change.

O tongue you are an endless treasure. O tongue, you are also an endless disease.

What was the point of even having a conversation when words couldn't be trusted?

If you say three things, you don't say anything.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

He who does not know how to be silent will not know how to speak.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.