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

More quotes by Franz Kafka

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Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.
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So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
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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.
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So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
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Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
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I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.
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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 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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I do not see the world at all I invent it.
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It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
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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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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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Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.
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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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The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.
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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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I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.
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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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Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
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There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.
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