1. The True Way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

3. There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: impatience and laziness. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of laziness we cannot return. Perhaps, however, there is only one cardinal sin; impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out, because of impatience we cannot return.

6. The decisive moment in human development is a continous one. For this reason the revolutionary movements which declare everything before them null and void are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

12. Like a road in autumn: Hardly is it swept clean before it is covered again with dead leaves.

13. A cage went in search of a bird.

15. If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without asecnding it, the work would have been permitted.

24. What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given.

25. Once we have granted accomodation to the Evil One he no longer demands that we should believe him.

29. The crows mantain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of crows.

36. One cannot pay the Evil One in installments - and yet one perpetually tries to do it.

54. There are questions which we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature.

66. Theorectically there exists a perfect possibility of happiness: to believe in the indestructible element in oneself and not strive after it.

73. Intercourse with human beings seduces one to self contemplation.

83. A faith like a guillotine, as heavy, as light.

84. Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.

103. "But then he returned to his work as if nothing had happened." That is a saying which sounds familiar to us from an indefinite number of old tales, though in fact it perhaps occurs in none.

--Franz Kafka

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