Franz Kafka Life Quotes

#1. From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

Kafka, Franz

#2. I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.

Franz Kafka

#3. 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

#4. 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.

Franz Kafka

#5. In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion.

Franz Kafka

#6. The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

Franz Kafka

#7. The meaning of life is that it ends.

Franz Kafka

#8. Kafkaesque

The term's meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.

Franz Kafka

#9. We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.

Franz Kafka

#10. 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

#11. All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

Franz Kafka

#12. Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.

Franz Kafka

#13. The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

Franz Kafka

#14. I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.

Franz Kafka

#15. It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill

Franz Kafka

#16. Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.

Franz Kafka

#17. Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.

Franz Kafka

#18. Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

Franz Kafka

#19. Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate ... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

Franz Kafka

#20. But I'm not guilty," said K. "there's been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We're all human beings here, one like the other." "That is true" said the priest "but that is how the guilty speak

Franz Kafka

#21. 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

#22. But what now if all the peace, the comfort, the contentment were to come to a horrible end?

Franz Kafka

#23. The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.

Franz Kafka

#24. Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.

Franz Kafka

#25. Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Franz Kafka

#26. Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

Franz Kafka

#27. He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn't yet lived.

Franz Kafka

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

Franz Kafka

#31. yet to be moved by music is essentially human; it reflects sensitivity. The life Gregor led as a human being left no room for this kind of appreciation. But, regressing into an animal, his sensibility has become refined rather than coarsened.

Franz Kafka

#32. And there shouldn't be anything to stop you carrying on with your usual life.

Franz Kafka

#33. The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.

Franz Kafka

#34. My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.

Franz Kafka

#35. Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Franz Kafka

#36. The meaning of life is that it stops.

Franz Kafka

#37. Life is hard, the earth stubborn, science rich in knowledge but poor in practical results.

Franz Kafka

#38. It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.

Franz Kafka

#39. Way
as her hands reached to the back of his father's head and she begged him to spare Gregor's life.

Franz Kafka

#40. Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

Franz Kafka

#41. So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you.

Franz Kafka

#42. Only the moment counts. It determines life.

Franz Kafka

#43. 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

#44. I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.

Franz Kafka