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.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

I carry the bars within me.

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.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.