Quotes About Philosophy

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

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

Un libro dev'essere un'ascia per il mare ghiacciato che è dentro di noi.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

But questions that don't answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.

Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

Writer speaks a stench.

You do not need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.

Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.

Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?

I am dead and despise anyone who isn't

I weigh my past against my future, but find them both admirable, cannot give either the preference, and find nothing to grumble at save the injustice of Providence that has so clearly favored me.

I always succeed in not being jealous but only sometimes in comprehending the pointlessness of jealousy.

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

I never wish to be easily defined. I'd rather float over other people's minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable, more like a transparent, paradoxically, iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

But happiness only if I can raise the world into the Pure, the True, the Immutable.

One does not have to believe everything is true, one only has to believe it is necessary.

No,' said the priest, 'we must not accept everything is true, we must only accept it is necessary.' 'A dismal thought,' said K., 'it makes untruth into a universal principle.

Teoricamente, só há uma possibilidade perfeita de felicidade: acreditar no indestrutível em si sem a ele aspirar.

?ki saatlik ya?am iki sayfal?k bir yaz?dan daha iyidir diye emin olmay?n. Yaz? yoksuldur ama daha temizdir.

Fragen war die Hauptsache

Once Kafka came to regard any philosophy as nothing more than a system of rules to be enforced, a dogma both bigger and smaller than himself, he withdrew from it.