Franz Kafka Quotes

“I’m doing badly, I’m doing well; whichever you prefer.”

“Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.”

“If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”

“. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.”

“I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.”

“Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.”

“People keep themselves at a tolerable height above an infernal abyss toward which they gravitate only by putting out all their strength and lovingly helping one another. They are tied together by ropes, and it's bad enough when the ropes around an individual loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into empty space; ghastly when the ropes break and he falls. That's why we should cling to the others.”

“But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?”

“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”

“No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.".”

“Books are a narcotic.”

“If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)”

“Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.”

“I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.”

“Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.”

“A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.”

“Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.”

“"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.”

“Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.”

“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.”

“And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.”

“There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.”