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The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.

Franz Kafka

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Franz Kafka
Age: 41 †
Born: 1883
Born: July 3
Died: 1924
Died: July 3
Aphorist
Claims Adjuster
Diarist
Fabulist
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
Praha
František Kafka
Kafka
Catch
Obstacles
Road
Fire
Literature
Must
Obstacle

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Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.
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Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.
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A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
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There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
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If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
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Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.
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And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.
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You're not cross with me, though? he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, No, no, I'm never cross with anyone.
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it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.
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One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.
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I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
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I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
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The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.
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In argument similes are like songs in love they describe much, but prove nothing.
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Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
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Books are a narcotic.
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Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer.
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If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
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For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.
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Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.
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