Some Aphorisms by Musil

from this original review in Time. I remember reading only the second one.

"Every age in which everything was permissible had made those living in it unhappy."

"One can actually say in advance that the progress that is really made will always be precisely what nobody wanted."

"[The] whole era ... had newly developed a strong religious tendency, not as the result of any religious destiny, but merely, as it seems, out of a feminine and irritable rebellion against money, knowledge and calculation, to all of which it passionately succumbed."

"Truth is not a crystal one can put in one's pocket, but an infinite fluid into which one falls headlong."

"Writing, like the pearl, is a disease."

This is another review from the same magazine. Surprising to see Time review this book. William Gass in his essay has this to say about the original American reception of The Man without Qualities.

In the United States, not noted for much acumen concerning matters of literary quality, the initial English translation was greeted with an animosity which cannot be ascribed to simple philistinism. As Christian Rogowski reports, Musil was described as an "almost intolerably bad writer," "a sort of jet-powered literary no-good," his style exhibited "a rather bumbling mass of Teutonic metaphysics." The Times Literary Supplement's favorable reception of the translation in London was judged to be part of a literary hoax.