Franz Kafka Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Dread of night. Dread of not-night.
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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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The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
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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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There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
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There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.
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It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
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It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
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A cage went in search of a bird.
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Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
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To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.
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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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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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Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
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The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
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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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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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Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.
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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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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.