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We need the books that affect us like a disaster

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
Disaster
Books
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Need
Needs
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Affect

More quotes by Franz Kafka

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They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
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.
Franz Kafka
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You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
Franz Kafka
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I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
Franz Kafka
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A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Franz Kafka
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I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.
Franz Kafka
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Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
Franz Kafka
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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
Franz Kafka
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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.
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.
Franz Kafka
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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.
Franz Kafka
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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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Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry it keeps hap­pen­ing in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.
Franz Kafka
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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.
Franz Kafka
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There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.
Franz Kafka
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Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.
Franz Kafka
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The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
Franz Kafka
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One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.
Franz Kafka
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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.
Franz Kafka
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We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.
Franz Kafka