Franz Kafka Quotes

I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

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.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.

Only the moment counts. It determines life.

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

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

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.

Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

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

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

First impressions are always unreliable.

We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.

Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.

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

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.

I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

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

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.

There's an infinite amount of hope but not for us.

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.

The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it.

If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you're okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don't let them go. People like that are hard to find.

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

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

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

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?

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 various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let goof the earth.

Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world.

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

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

Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.