Franz Kafka Quotes

“No sooner said than done - so acts your man of worth.”

“Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.”

“There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.”

“Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

“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.”

“It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.”

“God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.”

“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.”

“Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.”

“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.”

“The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.”

“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.”

“The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.”

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

“In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.”

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”

“In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.”

“This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.”

“Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.”

“Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.”

“One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.”

“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.”

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”