Franz Kafka - Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way lyrics

1 The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but is 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 continuous one. For this reason the revolutionary movements which declare everything before them to be null and void are in the right, for nothing has yet happened. 10 A first sign of nascent knowledge is the desire for d**h. This life seems unendurable, any other unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wishing to die; one prays to be conducted from the old cell that one hates into a new one that one has yet to hate. There is in this a vestige of faith that during the change the Master may chance to walk along the corridor, contemplate the prisoner, and say: "You must not lock up this one again. He is to come to me." 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 ascending 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 accommodation to the Evil One he no longer demands that we should believe him. 26 The afterthoughts with which you justify your accommodation of the Evil One are not yours but those of the Evil One. The animal snatches the whip from its master and whips itself so as to become master, and does not know that all of this is only a fantasy caused by a new knot in the master's whiplash. 29 The crows maintain 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 * * * It is conceivable that Alexander the Great, in spite of the martial successes of his early days, in spite of then excellent army that he had trained, in spite of the power he felt within him to change the world, might have remained standing on the bank of the Hellespont and never have crossed it, and not out of fear, not out of infirmity of will, but because of the mere weight of his own body. 52 There is only a spiritual world; what we call the physical world is the evil in the spiritual one, and what we call evil is only a necessary moment in our endless development. In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve. To weak eyes it becomes solid, to weaker eyes it shows fists, before still weaker eyes it feels ashamed and smites down him who dares to look at it. 53 All is deception: one can try to live with the minimum of illusion, take things as they are, or try to live with the maximum of illusion. In the first case one betrays good by wanting to make its achievement too easy, and evil by imposing overwhelmingly unfavorable fighting conditions upon it. In the second case one betrays good by refusing to strive towards it even on the earthly plane. In the third case one betrays good by sundering oneself as far as possible from it, and evil by hoping that through its ubiquity it may be rendered innocuous. From this it seems that the second course is the one to be preferred, for in every case one betrays good, but in this case one does not betray evil, at least in appearance. 54 There are questions which we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature. 55 For all things outside the physical world language can be employed only as a sort of adumbration, but never with even approximate exactitude, since in accordance with the physical world it treats only of possession and its connotations. 66 Theoretically 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. 75 Profane love can seem more sublime than sacred love; of itself it could not do this, but as, unknown to itself, it possessed an element of sacred love, it can. 83 A faith is like a guillotine, as heavy, as light. 84 d**h confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the cla**room. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world. 98 We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us possesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and d**h (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether in fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit. 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.