Robert Musil Quotes

As soon as I did, everything, the whole room, just clicked.

One of the strongest feelings you can get in life--one of the most rewarding feelings--is the feeling of an "Aha, I finally understand."

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.

As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.

I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

You basically only discover a new thing once.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.

When you're teaching a hard concept and the students all have puzzled looks on their faces and then suddenly you can see that 'aha' moment, that they got it, that's just an incredible thing.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

I still haven’t figured it out completely.

Inspiration is a really hard thing to describe, but it's something that triggers your brain, like the first time I heard a certain guitar player that I loved or the first time that I saw a monster or the first time that I saw anything that really was an epiphany for me. It just stays with you your whole life.

In literature there was always an epiphany - a tingling moment, sometimes buried - the pearl around which the whole work formed.

Understanding listening is an epiphany moment for every improviser. At least for me it was.

There's very little that's comparable to seeing the spark in a student's face when she gets something that she's been struggling with.