Quote

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?

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
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Writer
Praha
FrantiĊĦek Kafka
Kafka
Think
Ought
Thinking
Head
Books
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Stab
Read
Wound
Doesn
Wounds
Book
Wake
Kind
Blow

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Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.
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No, said the priest, you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary. Depressing view, said K. The lie made into the rule of the world.
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I do not see the world at all I invent it.
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Officials are highly educated but one-sided in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it.
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Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
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The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.
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There's an infinite amount of hope but not for us.
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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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The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.
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Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing but from their silence, certainly never.
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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.
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You can choose to be free , but it's last decision you'll ever make
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First impressions are always unreliable.
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In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
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You need not even listen, just wait...the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.
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I can't feel a thing All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.
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The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.
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The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.
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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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My 'fear' is my substance, and probably the best part of me.
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