Franz Kafka Quotes
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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
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To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible.
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There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.
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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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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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From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
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To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.
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A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
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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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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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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
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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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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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A cage went in search of a bird.
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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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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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I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.
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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
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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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It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
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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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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.