Top 100 Franz Kafka Quotes
#1. 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
#2. He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn't yet lived.
Franz Kafka
#3. There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.
Franz Kafka
#4. The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man
Franz Kafka
#5. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
Franz Kafka
#7. Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often - and in my inmost self perhaps all the time - I doubt whether I am a human being.
Franz Kafka
#8. He remembered his family with deep feelings of love.
Franz Kafka
#9. A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.
Franz Kafka
#10. In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
Franz Kafka
#11. I'm on such a dangerous road, Milena. You're standing firmly near a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes subduing with their radiance the suffering world.
Franz Kafka
#12. I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.
Franz Kafka
#13. The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
Franz Kafka
#14. Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one's own castle.
Franz Kafka
#15. The main thing, when a sword cuts into one's soul, is to keep a calm gaze, lose no blood, accept the coldness of the sword with the coldness of a stone. By means of the stab, after the stab, become invulnerable.
Franz Kafka
#16. I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.
Franz Kafka
#18. I made the remark that I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.
Franz Kafka
#19. Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
Franz Kafka
#20. Above all, he could not stop half way, that was nonsense not only in business but always and everywhere.
Franz Kafka
#22. But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.
Franz Kafka
#25. It is as if a person were a prisoner, and he had not only the intention to escape, which would perhaps be attainable, but also, and indeed simultaneously, the intention to rebuild the prison as a pleasure dome for himself. But if he escapes, he cannot rebuild, and if he rebuilds, he cannot escape.
Franz Kafka
#26. A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."
Franz Kafka
#27. Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope
but not for us.
Franz Kafka
#28. I asked myself at the time: how is it that she is not astonished at herself, that she keeps her mouth closed, and expresses nothing of any wonderment?
Franz Kafka
#29. The true way goes over a line that, rather than spanning heights, is hardly above the ground. It appears more decidedly to make one trip than to be walked along.
Franz Kafka
#30. How badly I even read. And with what malice and weakness I observe myself. Apparently I cannot force my way into the world, but lie quietly, receive, spread out within me what I have received, and then step calmly forth.
Franz Kafka
#31. The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.
Franz Kafka
#32. It seems to be a fact that man, tortured by his demons, avenges himself blindly on his fellow-man.
Franz Kafka
#33. I hope it is nothing serious. On the other hand, I must also say that we business people, luckily or unluckily, however one looks at it, very often simply have to overcome a slight indisposition for business reasons.
Franz Kafka
#34. Could K. represent the congregation all by himself? What if he had been a stranger merely visiting the church? That was more or less his position.
Franz Kafka
#35. Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.
Franz Kafka
#36. Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.
Franz Kafka
#37. We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.
Franz Kafka
#38. I was heading for the city in the south, of which they used to say in our village:
'There are people for you! Just think - they never go to sleep!'
'And why don't they?'
'Because they're fools.'
'Don't fools get tired, then?'
'How could fools get tired?
Franz Kafka
#39. When I say something, this thing immediately and definitively loses its importance. When I write it down, it also loses it, but sometimes gains another importance.
Franz Kafka
#40. Wrap your coat, O sublime dream, around the child.
Franz Kafka
#41. Kafka regarded the end of "The Metamorphosis"- its composition in interrupted by a business trip- as "unreadable." He also wrote in his diary that he found it"bad," but of course Kafka relished his failure. Failure is precisely what he expected and resolved to accomplish- and he hid behind it.
Franz Kafka
#42. It's always questionable to intervene decisively in strange circumstances.
Franz Kafka
#43. The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
Franz Kafka
#44. You belong to the people I have to combat, and you're very comfortable among them, you're even in love with the student, or if you don't love him you do at least prefer him to your husband.
Franz Kafka
#45. The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.
Franz Kafka
#46. One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.
Franz Kafka
#47. Don't concern yourself about anybody. Just do what you think is right.
Franz Kafka
#48. Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
Franz Kafka
#49. No sooner said than done - so acts your man of worth.
Franz Kafka
#50. If he stayed at home and carried on with his normal life he would be a thousand times superior to these people and could get any of them out of his way just with a kick.
Franz Kafka
#52. Like a dog! he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.
Franz Kafka
#53. There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.
Franz Kafka
#54. Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence ... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
Franz Kafka
#55. There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.
Franz Kafka
#56. All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.
Franz Kafka
#57. I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.
Franz Kafka
#58. I am always trying to convey something that can't be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.
Franz Kafka
#60. A false ring of the night bell, once answered - it can never be made right.
Franz Kafka
#61. How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense,
Franz Kafka
#62. He had vented all his woes and now they might as well see the few rags that covered his body, after which they could carry him away.
Franz Kafka
#63. Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.
Franz Kafka
#64. But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
Franz Kafka
#65. What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.
Franz Kafka
#67. The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.
Franz Kafka
#68. Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.
Franz Kafka
#69. I have now, and have had since this afternoon, a great yearning to write all of my anxiety entirely out of me.
Franz Kafka
#70. Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.
Franz Kafka
#71. There was always something in me to catch fire, in this heap of straw that I have been.
Franz Kafka
#72. What is written is merely the dregs of experience.
Franz Kafka
#73. We can't carry on like this. Maybe you can't see it, but I can. I don't want to call this monster my brother, all I can say is: we have to try and get rid of it.
Franz Kafka
#74. I can never tear myself open wide enough to people to reveal everything and so frighten them away.
Franz Kafka
#75. The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer.
Franz Kafka
#76. It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill
Franz Kafka
#77. A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Franz Kafka
#78. Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.
Franz Kafka
#79. Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.
Franz Kafka
#80. One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark
Franz Kafka
#81. Illusions are more common than changes in fortune
Franz Kafka
#82. How lonely it is here, and how well it suits you.
Franz Kafka
#83. Accept your symptoms, don't complain of them; immerse yourself in your suffering.
Franz Kafka
#84. I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.
Franz Kafka
#85. He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.
Franz Kafka
#86. I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.
Franz Kafka
#87. And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.
Franz Kafka
#88. If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.
Franz Kafka
#89. There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
Franz Kafka
#90. Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man
the most guilty.
Franz Kafka
#91. He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.
Franz Kafka
#92. Enlightenment comes to even the dimmest. It begins around the eyes, and it spreads outward from there- a sight that might tempt one to lie down under the harrow oneself.
Franz Kafka
#93. 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
#94. There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
Franz Kafka
#95. Like tired dogs they stand there,
because they use up all their strength
in remaining upright in one's memory.
Franz Kafka
#96. Alone I continue living, yet when a visitor arrives it kills me.
Franz Kafka
#97. All [the authorities] did was to guard the distant and invisible interests of distant and invisible masters
Franz Kafka
#98. We come to mistake the crumbs of mercy for the feast of love
Franz Kafka
#99. The door could not be heard closing; they must have left it open as is usual in houses visited by great misfortune.
Franz Kafka
#100. I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.
Franz Kafka
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