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I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Franz Kafka

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Franz Kafka
Age: 41 †
Born: 1883
Born: July 3
Died: 1924
Died: July 3
Aphorist
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Lawyer
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Poet Lawyer
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Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
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FrantiĊĦek Kafka
Kafka
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Wound
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Ought

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From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.
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In argument similes are like songs in love they describe much, but prove nothing.
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There is a goal but no way what we call the way is mere wavering.
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The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it. Recognition of this contact is the fact that even the soul does not know of itself. Hence it must remain unknown. That would be sad only if there were anything apart from the soul, but there is nothing else.
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He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.
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Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.
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If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?
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God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
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Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
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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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If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
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Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
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I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?
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We are separated from God on two sides the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.
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Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away but this opinion was all that he was permitted.
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Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.
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A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
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The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go - not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.
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Evil is whatever distracts.
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It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
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