A Quote by Franz Kafka

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

Franz Kafka

Quote Topics

Abyss Again Always Breath Dare Depths Dive Everyday Experience Fighting Later Laughing Must Now Order Pool Rise Sink Springboard Surface Swimming Swimming Pool Things Trivial Truth Truth Is

Quote Author

Franz Kafka
German - Novelist
July 3, 1883 - June 3, 1924

I think of me and Melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. No matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. But after we bobbed to the surface, we'd climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands, and do it again. We're swimming separately now. I get that. Maybe it's just what you have to do to keep above water. But who knows? Maybe one day, we'll climb out, grab hands, and jumo again.

Gayle Forman

When I was at Manchester, where there was a modern swimming pool, I was looked on as a great man, not for so trivial a reason as being an FRS, but because I used to dive off a five-metre board.

Louis J. Mordell

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

Hermann Hesse

Keynesians think that you can take water from the deep end of the swimming, pump it into the shallow end of the swimming pool and somehow the water level of the swimming pool will rise.

Thomas Woods

Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

There are many beautiful things in the world around us, but pearls can only be discovered in the depths of the sea; if we wish to posses spiritual pearls we must plunge into the depths, that is, we must pray, we must sink down into the secret depths of contemplation and prayer. Then we shall perceive precious pearls.

Sadhu Sundar Singh

Unfathomable oceans of grace are in Christ for you. Dive and dive again, you will never come to the bottom of these depths.

Robert E. Murray

This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can't see how deep it is.

Dennis Rodman

Unfathomable oceans of grace are in Christ for you. Dive and dive again, you will never come to the bottom of these depths. How many millions of dazzling pearls and gems are at this moment hid in the deep recesses of the ocean caves.

Robert Murray M'Cheyne

I say to my breath once again, little breath come from in front of me, go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can, for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

W. S. Merwin

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

Annie Dillard

When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You've got to be there. You've got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.

Gary Shteyngart

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.