Franz Kafka Quotes
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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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It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
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Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
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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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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
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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.
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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.
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Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
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One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.
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All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.
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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?
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They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
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There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.
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Paths are made by walking.
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Dread of night. Dread of not-night.
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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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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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'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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There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
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A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
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His weariness is that of the gladiator after the combat; his work was the whitewashing of a corner in a state official's office.
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Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.
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By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
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I am free and that is why I am lost.