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The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.

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
Real
Lies
Life
Greatest
Causes
Lying
Apparent
Fact
Cruelty
Death
Salvation
Facts
Brings
Ends
Sorrow

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A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
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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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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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The true way goes over a line that, rather than spanning heights, is hardly above the ground. It appears more decidedly to make one trip than to be walked along.
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I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.
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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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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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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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Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.
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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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There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
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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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Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
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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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Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.
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There is a goal but no way what we call the way is mere wavering.
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I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?
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If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
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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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