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The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

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
Lying
Tell
Art
Kafka
Cannot
Paradox
Truth
Thus
Lies
Depends
Writer

More quotes by Franz Kafka

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Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.
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. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.
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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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From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.
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The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
Franz Kafka
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The true way goes over a line that, rather than spanning heights, is hardly above the ground. It appears more decidedly to make one trip than to be walked along.
Franz Kafka
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Paths are made by walking
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One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.
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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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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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Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes 'fast' like a watch - sometimes.
Franz Kafka
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The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.
Franz Kafka
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Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.
Franz Kafka
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What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.
Franz Kafka
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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.
Franz Kafka
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Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.
Franz Kafka
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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?
Franz Kafka
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I, however, cannot force myself to use meat drugs to cheat on my loneliness.
Franz Kafka
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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.
Franz Kafka
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People who walk across dark bridges, past saints, with dim, small lights. Clouds which move across gray skies past churches with towers darkened in the dusk. One who leans against granite railing gazing into the evening waters, His hands resting on old stones.
Franz Kafka