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I carry the bars within me.

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
Carry
Within
Bars

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The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
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There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
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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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They did not know what we can now guess at, contemplating the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence.
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He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.
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I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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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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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.
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Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
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A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.
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This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.
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Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.
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All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
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There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
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The founder brought the laws from the lawgiver the faithful are meant to announce the laws to the lawgiver.
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Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.
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It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.
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Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.
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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
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If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
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