Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

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

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.

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

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