Franz Kafka Quotes
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Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
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My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
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Paths are made by walking.
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We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.
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What is gayer than believing in a household god?
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So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
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May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
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The way is infinitely long, nothing of it can be subtracted, nothing can be added, and yet everyone applies his own childish yardstick to it. 'Certainly, this yard of the way you still have to go, too, and it will be accounted unto you.'
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Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
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'You asking me the way?' 'Yes,' I said, 'since I can't find it myself.' 'Give it up! Give it up!' said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.
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Only the moment counts. It determines life.
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Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
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One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
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The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
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Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.
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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
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It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.
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To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.
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Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.
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Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
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Please — consider me a dream.
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Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.
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Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
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How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.