Христо Христов > Христо's Quotes

“Whatever you are physically...male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”
― Kafka, Franz

“Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.”
― Kafka, Franzv

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
― Franz Kafka

“I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
― Franz Kafka

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
― Franz Kafka

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“What am I doing here in this endless winter?”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.”
― Franz Kafka

“Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.”
― Franz Kafka

“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.”
― Franz Kafka

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Evil is whatever distracts.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“You can choose to be free , but it's last decision you'll ever make”
― -Kafka

“Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”
― Franz Kafka

“I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”
― Franz Kafka

“Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.”
― Franz Kafka