Franz Kafka Quotes

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

Sometimes I'd like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket. then open it to see if they've suffocated

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

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

The limited circle is pure.

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

Paths are made by walking

He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.

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.

The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go - not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.

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

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

Writer speaks a stench.

It is strange how little sharpsightedness women possess; they only notice whether they please, then whether they arouse pity, and finally, whether you look for compassion from them. That is all; come to think of it, it may even be enough, generally speaking.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

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.

From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

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.

One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark

I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

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

There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.

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

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

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.

One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.

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.

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.

there is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak

Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

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.

What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.