Quote

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

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
Somewhere
Beginning
Outside
Orbit
Whether
Narrow
Two
Hiding
Ever
Check
Life
Checks
Tasks

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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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Sometimes I'd like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket. then open it to see if they've suffocated
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Now I can look at you in peace I don't eat you any more.
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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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Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
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I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.
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The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.
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He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
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There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought
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There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.
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Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.
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What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.
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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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Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
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Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.
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Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
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So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
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A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
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One reads in order to ask questions
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I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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