Franz Kafka Quotes
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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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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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There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.
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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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Dread of night. Dread of not-night.
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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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Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
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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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The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
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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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It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
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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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There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
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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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To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.
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Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
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Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
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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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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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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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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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The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.