Quote

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.

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
Open
Useless
Wooden
Existence
Snow
Stake
Dark
Stuck
Stakes
Show
Winter
Plain
Night
Field
Edge
Shows
Ground
Covered
Ploughed
Would
Picture
Vast
Slant
Fields
Edges
Loosely

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There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.
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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.
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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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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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Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
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There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.
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A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
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All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
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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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This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.
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If all responsibility is imposed on you, then you may want to exploit the moment and want to be overwhelmed by the responsibilityyet if you try, you will notice that nothing was imposed on you, but that you are yourself this responsibility.
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The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.
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Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.
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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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One reads in order to ask questions
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A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
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Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.
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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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I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.
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Paths are made by walking
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