Top 100 Quotes About Franz Kafka: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Franz Kafka

#1. In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying ... Whom am I sleeping with these days ? Franz Kafka.

Patricia Highsmith

#2. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" asked "That if Franz Kafka were here his head would explode?"
"Actually, yeah.

David Wong

#3. But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.

Vaclav Havel

#4. I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.

Alan Lightman

#5. You don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen, simply wait. Don't even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. - Franz Kafka

Tom Robbins

#6. If Franz Kafka were alive today he'd be writing about customer service.

Jonathan Alter

#7. There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness." Franz Kafka

Jason Harvey

#8. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904

Franz Kafka

#9. My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.

Louis Begley

#10. Passionless is vulgar ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")

William S. Wilson

#11. Franz Kafka wrote, "It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you." And Kafka was born a century before the Internet!

Austin Kleon

#12. I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Margaret Atwood

#13. Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don't take over.

Alan Lightman

#14. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

#15. It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women.

Clive James

#16. A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator's gold-veined mirror for this three-floor ascent of the aggressively nondescript O My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube K, apparently a Franz Kafka theme bar.

William Gibson

#17. I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.

Franz Kafka

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

Franz Kafka

#19. The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

Franz Kafka

#20. It is to us artisans and tradesmen that the salvation of the fatherland is entrusted; but we are not equal to such a task; never, indeed, have we claimed that we were capable of performing it. It is a misunderstanding; and it is proving our ruin.

Franz Kafka

#21. Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.

Franz Kafka

#22. 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

#23. I like to make use of what I know

Franz Kafka

#24. Evil is whatever distracts.

Franz Kafka

#25. For a man under suspicion movement is better than rest, for the man who is at rest can always, without knowing it, be on the scales being weighed together with his sins.

Franz Kafka

#26. If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.

Franz Kafka

#27. Nobody else could have got in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it'." "So

Franz Kafka

#28. Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Franz Kafka

#29. If all responsibility is imposed on you, then you may want to exploit the moment and want to be overwhelmed by the responsibility;yet if you try, you will notice that nothing was imposed on you, but that you are yourself this responsibility.

Franz Kafka

#30. You need not even listen, just wait ... the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.

Franz Kafka

#31. 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

#32. Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.

Franz Kafka

#33. Of course I'm ignorant, that remains true at all events and is extremely distressing for me, but it does have the advantage that the ignorant man dares more, so I shall gladly put up with ignorance and its undoubtedly dire consequences for a while, as long as my strength lasts.

Franz Kafka

#34. Calm - indeed the calmest - reflection might be better than the most confused decisions

Franz Kafka

#35. Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Franz Kafka

#36. In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Franz Kafka

#37. True undoubting is the teacher's part, continual undoubting the part of the pupil.

Franz Kafka

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

Franz Kafka

#39. By your side I'm most quiet and most unquiet, most inhibited and most free.

Franz Kafka

#40. I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.

Franz Kafka

#41. Fear of night. Fear of not night.

Franz Kafka

#42. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of impatience that they do not return.

Franz Kafka

#43. 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

#44. Only that which happens is possible.

Franz Kafka

#45. Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.

Franz Kafka

#46. Not everyone can see the truth, but everyone can be the truth.

Franz Kafka

#47. Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.

Franz Kafka

#48. How are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt when everything is devoid of meaning?

Franz Kafka

#49. If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Franz Kafka

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

Franz Kafka

#51. Just because your doctor has a name for your condition, doesn't mean he knows what it is.

Franz Kafka

#52. The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

Franz Kafka

#53. There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.

Franz Kafka

#54. The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man

Franz Kafka

#55. The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how [to] free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times [I'd] rather be torn to pieces than rather it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.

Franz Kafka

#56. 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

#57. Guilt is never to be doubted.

Franz Kafka

#58. But now you must give me your hand, an agreement of this sort needs to be confirmed with a handshake. Will she shake hands with me?

Franz Kafka

#59. Writing is a deeper sleep than death.
Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave,
I can't be dragged from my desk at night.

Franz Kafka

#60. Alone -- do you know what that means?

Franz Kafka

#61. You are free and that is why you are lost.

Franz Kafka

#62. But happiness only if I can raise the world into the Pure, the True, the Immutable.

Franz Kafka

#63. The sister played so beautifully. Her face was tilted to one side and she followed the notes with soulful and probing eyes. Gregor advanced a little, keeping his eyes low so that they might possibly meet hers. Was he a beast if music could move him so?

Franz Kafka

#64. Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn't know the law and at the same time insists he's innocent.

Franz Kafka

#65. 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

#66. You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Franz Kafka

#67. I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be on one's guard against them.

Franz Kafka

#68. I never wish to be easily defined.

Franz Kafka

#69. 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

#70. The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.

Franz Kafka

#71. All that matters is that the wound fit the arrow

Franz Kafka

#72. In her opinion her singing falls on deaf ears anyway; there is no lack of enthusiasm and applause, but she has long since given up hope of genuine understanding as she conceives it.

Franz Kafka

#73. How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Franz Kafka

#74. For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.

Franz Kafka

#75. He remembered his family with deep feelings of love.

Franz Kafka

#76. A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.

Franz Kafka

#77. 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

#78. One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.

Franz Kafka

#79. I'm not in the right place - alas, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that I'm not in the right place.

Franz Kafka

#80. Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs.

Franz Kafka

#81. Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

Franz Kafka

#82. One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.

Franz Kafka

#83. There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Franz Kafka

#84. What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.

Franz Kafka

#85. It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.

Franz Kafka

#86. In Kafka's story "Wedding Preparations in the Country," Edward Raban fantasizes about splitting into two forms: one, to remain in bed all day, dreaming; the other, to go forth and conduct the business of the world.

Franz Kafka

#87. We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

Franz Kafka

#88. Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

Franz Kafka

#89. What are our lungs supposed to do?" I shouted. Shouted: "If they breathe fast they suffocate themselves from inner poisons; if they breathe slowly they suffocate from unbreathable air, from outraged things. But if they try to search for their own rhythm they perish from the mere search.

Franz Kafka

#90. The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes.

Franz Kafka

#91. I carry the bars within me.

Franz Kafka

#92. Asking questions were the most important thing.

Franz Kafka

#93. Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.

Franz Kafka

#94. It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

Franz Kafka

#95. Then birds flew up like a shower of sparks, I followed them with my eyes and saw how they rose in a single breath, until they seemed no longer to be rising but I to be falling ...

Franz Kafka