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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
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Writer
Praha
FrantiĊĦek Kafka
Kafka
Obstacle
Catch
Obstacles
Road
Fire
Literature
Must

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How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?
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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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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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Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
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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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Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.
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I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
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Books are a narcotic.
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His biggest misgiving came from his concern about the loud crash that was bound to occur and would probably create, if not terror, at least anxiety behind all the doors. But that would have to be risked.
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One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark
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What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.
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First impressions are always unreliable.
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Officials are highly educated but one-sided in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it.
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I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
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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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There is nothing besides a spiritual world what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
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So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
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I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.
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May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
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