Grace

“Inescapable duty of self-observation: If I am observed by someone else, naturally I must observe myself too, if I am observed by no one else, I must observe myself all the more closely.”
― Franz Kafka

“Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs.

It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted?”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“At a certain level of self-awareness and under other accompanying circumstances favorable to observation it will necessarily happen regularly that one finds oneself abhorrent. Every standard of the good-however varied the opinions on it may be will appear too great.
One will realize that one is nothing but a rat hole of wretched ulterior motives. Not the slightest action will be free of these ulterior motives.

These ulterior motives will be so filthy that in a state of self-observation one will at first not even want to think them through, but rather content oneself with the sight of them from a distance. These ulterior motives will not consist merely of selfishness, compared to them selfishness will appear to be an ideal of the good and the beautiful. The filth one will find will be there for its own sake, one will recognize that one came into the world dripping with this burden and due to it will depart unrecognizably or all-too-recognizably. This filth will be the bottommost depth one will find, the bottommost depth will contain not lava but filth”
― Franz Kafka

“There’s no doubt that a Sunday can never be of more use to me than a weekday, since it’s special schedule jumbled up all my habits and I need the extra free time to adjust myself halfway to this special day”
― Franz Kafka