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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.

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
Least
Whip
Hand
Whips
Learn
Gentlemen
Hands
Gentleman
Way
Desperate
Resistance
Learned
Lash
Stand
Lashes

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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
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May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
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You're not cross with me, though? he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, No, no, I'm never cross with anyone.
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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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I, however, cannot force myself to use meat drugs to cheat on my loneliness.
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Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let goof the earth.
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So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
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There is nothing besides a spiritual world what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
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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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If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.
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We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us. What was ordained for us has been changed it is not said that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise.
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In argument similes are like songs in love they describe much, but prove nothing.
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If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
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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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We are separated from God on two sides the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.
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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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I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.
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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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Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
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The meaning of life is that it stops.
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