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"I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength."
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"It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient."

"In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence."

"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."

"When you get to know me, I don't despair - I just get up, clean up, and start again."

"Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."

"I've found a different way to scent the air: already it's a by-word for despair."

"We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else."
Explore more quotes by Franz Kafka

"Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe."

"One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so."

"It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable."

"It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones."

"But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?"

"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."

"One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party."

"The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer."

"In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it."
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