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"No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women."
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"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art."
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Personal Development

"The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science."
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Personal Development

"I see my life in terms of music."
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Personal Development

"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."
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Personal Development

"She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir."
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Personal Development

"The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics."
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Personal Development

"History develops, art stands still."
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Personal Development

"We are all artists painting our desires on the canvas of life and time."
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Personal Development

"To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job."
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Personal Development

"The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'"
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Personal Development
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"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness."
Happiness

"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
Compassion

"Optimism is the opium of the people."
People

"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
Reflection

"The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything."
History

"Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes)."
Identity

"He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist."
Mortality

"He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him."
Anger

"Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
Purpose

"In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted."
Philosophy
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