Franz Kafka Quotes - Page 8

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

No one can crave what truly harms him.

Torment yourself as little as possible, then you'll torment me less.

Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.

The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.

Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

Religions get lost as people do.

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

People who walk across dark bridges, past saints, with dim, small lights. Clouds which move across gray skies past churches with towers darkened in the dusk. One who leans against granite railing gazing into the evening waters, His hands resting on old stones.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.

I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.

If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One.

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.

If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.