Quote

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

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
Stand
Barely
Days
Sink
Effort
Advance
Incapacity
Writing
Efforts
Prodigious
Cast
Sinks
Casts
Dive
Ten
Interrupted
Already
Rapidly

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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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He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.
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Kill me, or you are a murderer.
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One reads in order to ask questions
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Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.
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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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They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong
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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?
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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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Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.
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German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.
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One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
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The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.
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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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My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.
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What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.
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A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
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In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
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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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