Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Franz Kafka
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make...
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make...
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make...
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make...
About This Quote

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. John Gerard de Nerval wrote this in 1858, and it’s as good a summary as any of the central themes of poetry. If you’re into poetry, you understand that those “obsessions” aren’t necessarily things like “love and death and sex and religion and nature and transcendence,” but rather they can be whatever it is that draws you to poetry in the first place: the rhythms, the rhymes, the sonorities, or whatever. You can call those obsessions anything you want, but what de Nerval is really saying is “Follow them mercilessly.”

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More Quotes By Franz Kafka
  1. Love is a drama of contradictions.
  2. May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
  3. Yours(now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)
  4. The meaning of life is that it stops.
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