A Quote by Franz Kafka

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

Franz Kafka

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Dregs Experience Merely Written

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

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.

Julio Cortazar

I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?

Lawrence Clark Powell

The cross stands as the final symbol that no evil exists that God cannot turn into a blessing. He is the living Alchemist who can take the dregs from the slag-heaps of life - disappointment, frustration, sorrow, disease, death, economic loss, heartache - and transform the dregs into gold.

Catherine Marshall

My diaries were written primarily, I think, not to preserve the experience but to savor it, to make it even more real, more visible and palpable, than in actual life. For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.

Madeleine L'Engle

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what your experience of God differs from what you've heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.

Neale Donald Walsch

Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individual experience.

Aldous Huxley

Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, I'm so involved with the experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I can't see what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat - of self-critical heat when I'm actually writing.

Edward Albee

Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.

Blaise Pascal

Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

Henry David Thoreau

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

John Ruskin

Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands between that person and death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. "Losing one's head," language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience.

Robert Musil

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Mark Twain

....the popular music of Jamaica, the music of the people, is an essentially experiential music, not merely in the sense that the people experience the music, but also in the sense that the music is true to the historical experience, that the music reflects the historical experience. It is the spiritual expression of the historical experience of the Afro-Jamaican.

Linton Kwesi Johnson

I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.

Patrick O'Brian

Readers may be divided into four classes: 1) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Quote by Franz Kafka

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