On June 3, 1924, the literary giant Franz Kafka died of lung disease in a sanatorium in Vienna at the age of 41. During his short life, Kafka wrote a large number of short and medium stories, three unfinished novels, "The Castle", "The Lawsuit" and "America", as well as many letters, essays, diaries, and proverbs. They have long been classics and have profoundly influenced countless people in later generations. Deep, sharp, absurd, and thorough, like a sharp axe splitting the frozen sea deep inside people.
1.
Everyone lives behind the iron fence they carry, so there are so many books written about animals now. This expresses the desire for one's own, natural life, and man's natural life is life, but this is invisible to people. People don't want to see that. Human survival is too hard, so people at least want to abandon it in their imagination.
2.
I never get enough heat, so I burn — burn to ashes because of the cold.
3.
You wrote the writer as a great man with feet on the earth and blue sky on his head... In fact, writers are always much smaller and weaker than ordinary people in society. Therefore, he feels the hardships of human life more deeply and more intensely than others. For him personally, his singing was just a cry. Art is a pain for the artist, and through this pain he liberates himself to endure new pain. He is not a giant, but just a more or less colorful bird in the cage of life.
4.
On the handle of Balzac's cane is written: I am crushing all obstacles. On the handle of my cane it read: All obstacles are crushing me. What is in common: everything.
5.
Unless you flee into this world, how can you be happy about this world? People have to abandon life in order to get a life.
6.
Let's stand still and insert with both feet the mud of opinions, prejudices, rumors, deceptions and fantasies, and insert these shocks that cover the surface of the earth until we touch the bottom of the hard stone blocks. We call this reality.
7.
You can escape the suffering of this world, which is your freedom and in accord with your nature. But perhaps, to be precise, the only thing you can escape is the escape itself.
8.
The real road is on a rope, it is not taut at a high place, but close to the ground. It is not so much for people to walk than to stumble.
9.
All human error is nothing more than impatience, too hasty to disrupt the step-by-step process, and to circle specious things with specious piles.
10.
What is wealth? For A, an old shirt is a fortune, while B is still poor with ten million dollars. Wealth is something that is completely relative, something that cannot satisfy... Wealth implies attachment to possession, and man has to protect his possession from loss through new possessions, new dependencies. It's just a materialized insecurity.
11.
You don't have to get out of the house. Just sit at your table and listen. You don't even have to listen, just wait. Even waiting is not necessary, keep complete silence and loneliness well, the world will shed its shell before you, it will not be anything else, it will flutter and writhe in front of you.
12.
Be calm and patient. You try to make bad things happen well. You don't dodge. Instead, watch carefully. You need to replace passive stimuli with active understanding. That way you'll deal with these things. Man can only attain nobility by experiencing his own smallness.
13.
The struggle for the warmth necessary in life is always very urgent, and it is related to the choice between life and death, so that one cannot be just a bystander. Neither shrubs nor trees can protect us, and life is not the Kiska Mountain. Everyone can fall under the wheel. The weak and the poor predate the strong and the rich who have enough fuel. It can be said that the weak often collapse before they are crushed by the wheels.
14.
Light may lead people away from their inner darkness. If the Light conquers man, that is good. Without these terrible sleepless nights, I wouldn't have written at all. And at night, I was always well aware of my situation of solitary confinement.
15.
Why bother reading such a short-lived thing? Most modern books are nothing more than a reflection of today's fleeting brilliance. This light will soon be extinguished. You should read more ancient books, classical literature, and Goethe. The classical stuff reveals its innermost value to the outside—persistence. New things are short-lived, today is wonderful, tomorrow is ridiculous. This is the truth of literature.
16.
Whoever you are, as long as you can't cope with life while you are alive, you should use one hand to shake off the despair that hangs over your fate... But at the same time, you can scribble everything you see in the ruins with your other hand, because you see it differently from others, and more, in short, you are dead in your own lifetime, but you are the real rescued.
17.
The two clocks go inconsistencies. The inner clock seems to be crazy, or it is magical, or it is running in an inhuman way anyway, and the one on the outside is walking slowly at its usual speed. What could be more than two different worlds dividing into each other? And the two worlds are dividing, or at least tearing apart, in a terrible way.
18.
People hated the old cell and begged to be transferred to a new one. There people will begin to learn to hate this new cell.
19.
Stay where you are, don't move, the world will take the initiative to come to you.
20.
The heart is a house with two bedrooms, one inhabited by pain and the other inhabited by joy, and one cannot laugh too loudly. Otherwise laughter would wake up the pain in the next room.
21.
You don't know how much power silence contains. Aggressive aggression is only an illusion, a ruse, and people often use it to cover up shortcomings in front of themselves and the world. The real lasting power lies in enduring. Only soft bones are impatient and rude. He usually loses his human dignity as a result.
22.
Youth is full of sunshine and love. Young people are happy because they can see beauty. As soon as this ability is lost, the unsintained old age begins, and the decline and misfortune begin. Whoever can maintain the ability to discover beauty will not grow old.
23.
Music produces new, more delicate, more complex, and therefore more dangerous stimuli, while literature clarifies the complex stimuli, elevates them to consciousness, purifies them, and thus gives them humanity. Music is an exponential increase in sensory life. Literature, on the other hand, suppresses sensory life and leads it to higher levels.
24.
We live in an age of evil. Nothing is worthy of the name now, for example, now that the roots of man have long since been pulled out of the land, people are talking about their homeland.
25.
Yes, people are so pathetic. For he is becoming more and more lonely minute by minute in the ever-increasing crowd.
26.
There are all kinds of possibilities in life, and what is reflected in all possibilities is only an inescapable impossibility of one's own existence.
27.
The fountain of desire is the fountain of his loneliness.
Image | Kafka himself and the writer Bruno Schultz