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To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible.
Franz Kafka -
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.
Franz Kafka
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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.
Franz Kafka -
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.
Franz Kafka -
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
Franz Kafka -
I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
Franz Kafka -
There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.
Franz Kafka -
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
Franz Kafka
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A cage went in search of a bird.
Franz Kafka -
I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.
Franz Kafka -
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.
Franz Kafka -
To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.
Franz Kafka -
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.
Franz Kafka -
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.
Franz Kafka
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Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.
Franz Kafka -
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.
Franz Kafka -
It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
Franz Kafka -
'Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible,' she said, 'but that alone doesn't make it true.'
Franz Kafka -
'Like a dog!' he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.
Franz Kafka -
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.
Franz Kafka
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I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
Franz Kafka -
'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.
Franz Kafka -
Dread of night. Dread of not-night.
Franz Kafka -
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.
Franz Kafka