Previously I did not understand why I got no answer to my question; today I do not understand how I could believe I was capable of asking. But I didn’t really believe, I only asked.
I write differently from the way I speak, I speak differently from the way I think, I think differently from the way I should think - and so it goes on into the darkest depths of infinity (Letter to Ottla, July 10, 1914)
I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but cannot stay up there for more than a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying. (Diaries)
He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive. (Aphorisms)
Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body. (Diaries)
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. (Diaries)
The bone of his own forehead obstructs his way; he knocks himself bloody against his own forehead. (Diaries)
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being. (Diaries)
He has found Archimedes' fulcrum, but he has turned it to account against himself, clearly he was permitted to find it only on this condition. (Aphorisms)
Small cities also have small surroundings for those taking walks.
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? ...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.
A cage went in search of a bird.
There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.
The mediation by the serpent was necessary: Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
The thornbush is old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
The Policeman said to me, "You want to know the way? Give up! Just give up!" And he turned away like a man that wants to be alone with his laughter.
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. Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within. I am nothing but a mass of spikes going through me. In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
My life is hesitation before birth.
Paths are made by walking.
We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the grief's that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.
Who has the gift to recognize beauty, will not live long.
Writing is a form of prayer.
There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return.
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities for escape, again, are as many as hiding places.
The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash. The way is infinitely long, nothing of it can be subtracted, nothing can be added, and yet everyone applies his own childish yardstick to it. “Certainly, this yard of the way you still have to go, too, and it will be accounted unto you.”
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.
One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature. The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
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.
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let go of the earth.
Books are a narcotic.
Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.
"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true."
Evil is whatever distracts.
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
I was so insecure about everything that all I was really sure of was what I already held in my hands or my mouth or what was well on its way there.
In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
It is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times, and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time?
It is often better to be in chains than to be free.
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable. The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life — the terror of art.
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.
This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.
What does the court want with you? It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
"A Little Fable": Kafka
"Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into," "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
I write differently from the way I speak, I speak differently from the way I think, I think differently from the way I should think - and so it goes on into the darkest depths of infinity (Letter to Ottla, July 10, 1914)
I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but cannot stay up there for more than a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying. (Diaries)
He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive. (Aphorisms)
Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body. (Diaries)
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. (Diaries)
The bone of his own forehead obstructs his way; he knocks himself bloody against his own forehead. (Diaries)
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being. (Diaries)
He has found Archimedes' fulcrum, but he has turned it to account against himself, clearly he was permitted to find it only on this condition. (Aphorisms)
Small cities also have small surroundings for those taking walks.
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? ...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.
A cage went in search of a bird.
There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.
The mediation by the serpent was necessary: Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
The thornbush is old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
The Policeman said to me, "You want to know the way? Give up! Just give up!" And he turned away like a man that wants to be alone with his laughter.
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. Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within. I am nothing but a mass of spikes going through me. In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
My life is hesitation before birth.
Paths are made by walking.
We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the grief's that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.
Who has the gift to recognize beauty, will not live long.
Writing is a form of prayer.
There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return.
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities for escape, again, are as many as hiding places.
The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash. The way is infinitely long, nothing of it can be subtracted, nothing can be added, and yet everyone applies his own childish yardstick to it. “Certainly, this yard of the way you still have to go, too, and it will be accounted unto you.”
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.
One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature. The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
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.
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let go of the earth.
Books are a narcotic.
Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.
"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true."
Evil is whatever distracts.
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
I was so insecure about everything that all I was really sure of was what I already held in my hands or my mouth or what was well on its way there.
In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
It is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times, and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time?
It is often better to be in chains than to be free.
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable. The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life — the terror of art.
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.
This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.
What does the court want with you? It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
"A Little Fable": Kafka
"Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into," "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
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