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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?

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
Doesn
Wounds
Book
Wake
Kind
Blow
Think
Ought
Thinking
Head
Books
Reading
Stab
Read
Wound

More quotes by Franz Kafka

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He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.
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Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
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For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.
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And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.
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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 is a destination but no way there what we refer to as way is hesitation.
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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.
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One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.
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Writing [is] a form of prayer.
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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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In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
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I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.
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it was like this. the brain could no longer bear the worries and pains that were imposed on it. it said: i'm giving up but if there is anyone else here who is interested in preserving the whole, let him assume part of my burden and it will be alright for a bit.
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it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.
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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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Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
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I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.
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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.
Franz Kafka
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But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.
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