A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
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.
There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.
And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.
Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
No sooner said than done - so acts your man of worth.
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.
Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.
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.
it was like this. the brain could no longer bear the worries and pains that were imposed on it. it said: "i'm giving up; but if there is anyone else here who is interested in preserving the whole, let him assume part of my burden and it will be alright for a bit.
Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.
What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.
. . . 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.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.
Writers speak stench.
The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
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