Franz Kafka Quotes
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The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.
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Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
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You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
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One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
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The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
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Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
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'Hey, there’s something falling down in there,' said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had happened to him might some day also happen to the chief clerk. There was no denying that anything was possible.
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To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.
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There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.
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A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.
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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.
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Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
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Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.
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There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.
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From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
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Paths are made by walking.
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If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
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Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
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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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It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
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By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.