Franz Kafka Quotes

“I, however, cannot force myself to use "meat drugs" to cheat on my loneliness.”

“What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?”

“Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.”

“Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.”

“From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever.”

“For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.”

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

“Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.”

“Please — consider me a dream.”

“Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.”

“As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.”

“Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.”

“Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

“Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.”

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

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

“Torment yourself as little as possible, then you'll torment me less.”

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

“Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.”

“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

“I like to make use of what I know”

“I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.”

“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.”

“The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.”