Franz Kafka Quotes
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I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.
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We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
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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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A cage went in search of a bird.
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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
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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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'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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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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The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
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If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.
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One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
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I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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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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The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked upon.
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Evil is a radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is a mere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
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A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
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How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.
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It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
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To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.
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'Don't you want to join us?' I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. 'No, I don't,' I said.
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'Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible,' she said, 'but that alone doesn't make it true.'
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Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
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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.