If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, … - Franz Kafka

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We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. . . When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers. . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Franz Kafka

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Frozen, God, Happiness, Happy, Reading, Suicide

Same Author Quotes

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.

Beautiful, Real, Talking, Hear

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.

Education, Time, Laughter, Accordance, Hands, Drumbeat

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Believe, Mean, Progress, Believing

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. . . someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

Song, Silence, Singing, Possibly, Escaped

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

Patience, Art, Spring, Cardinal