Quote

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.

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
Keys
Seem
Rooms
Books
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Book
Castle
Like
Unfamiliar
Castles

More quotes by Franz Kafka

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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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The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
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The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.
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From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
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Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.
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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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Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.
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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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Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.
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Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
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The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.
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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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So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
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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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Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
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One reads in order to ask questions
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I’m doing badly, I’m doing well whichever you prefer.
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A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
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Life is merely terrible I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.
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April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.
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