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Blue Octavo Notebooks QUOTES

Blue Octavo Notebooks QUOTES

1 " When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon.
The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

2 " The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

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

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

4 " One of the first signs of the beginning 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 willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

5 " 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. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

6 " Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

7 " The man in ecstasy and the man drowning—both throw up their arms. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

8 " The main thing, when a sword cuts into one’s soul, is to keep a calm gaze, lose no blood, accept the coldness of the sword with the coldness of a stone. By means of the stab, after the stab, become invulnerable. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

9 " How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

10 " Evil has ways of surprising one. Suddenly it turns round and says: “You have misunderstood me,” and perhaps it really is so. Evil transforms itself into your own lips, lets itself be gnawed at by your teeth, and with these new lips -- no former ones fitted smoothly to your gums -- to your own amazement you utter the words of goodness. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

11 " Seen with the terrestrially sullied eye, we are in a situation of travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties. Round about us, however, in the confusion of our senses, or in the supersensitiveness of our senses, we have nothing but monstrosities and a kaleidoscopic play of things that is either delightful or exhausting according to the mood and injury of each individual. What shall I do? or: Why should I do it? are not questions to be asked in such places. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

12 " If you were walking across a plain, had an honest intention of walking on, and yet kept regressing, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are scrambling up a cliff, about as steep as you yourself are if seen from below, the regression can only be caused by the nature of the ground, and you must not despair. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

13 " Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

14 " It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

15 " It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

16 " At least descriptive psychology is probably, taken as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own limits. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

17 " Your will is free means: it was free when it wanted the desert, it is free since it can choose the path that leads to crossing the desert, it is free since it can choose the pace, but it is also unfree since you must go through the desert, unfree since every path in labyrinthine manner touches every foot of the desert’s surface. "

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks

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

― Franz Kafka , Blue Octavo Notebooks