Franz Kafka Quotes
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I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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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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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
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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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'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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Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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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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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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You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
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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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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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Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
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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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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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By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
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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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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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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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From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
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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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Paths are made by walking.
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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.