“The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.”

“Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.”

“It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?”

“They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives...”

“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.”

“Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.”

“Lying in my heap of Earth I can naturally dream of all sorts of things, even of an understanding with the beast, though I know well enough that no such thing can happen, and at the moment when we see each other, more, at that at the instant we merely guess at each other's presence, we shall both blindly bare our claws and teeth, neither of us a second before or after the other, both of us filled with a new and different hunger, even if we should already be gorged to bursting.”