Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."
112 Quotes
"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."
Franz Kafka
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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 speaks he lies."
Franz Kafka
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"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."
Franz Kafka
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"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."
Franz Kafka
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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."
Franz Kafka
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"The meaning of life is that it stops."
Franz Kafka
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"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."
Franz Kafka
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"Books are a narcotic."
Franz Kafka
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"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."
Franz Kafka
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"What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream."
Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis
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"Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers."
Franz Kafka
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"Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so."
Franz Kafka
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"It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet."
Franz Kafka
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"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable."
Franz Kafka
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"Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."
Franz Kafka
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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."
Franz Kafka
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"Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms."
Franz Kafka
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"Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive."
Franz Kafka
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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."
Franz Kafka
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"My 'fear' is my substance, and probably the best part of me."
Franz Kafka
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