Franz Kafka Quotes

I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

When K. looked at the castle, often it seemed to him as if he were observing someone who sat quietly there in front of him gazing, not lost in thought and so oblivious of everything, but free and untroubled, as if he were alone with nobody to observe him, and yet must notice that he was observed, and all the same remained with his calm not even slightly disturbed; and really - one did not know whether it was cause or effect - the gaze of the observer could not remain concentrated there, but slid away.

Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.

They did not know what we can now guess at, contemplating the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence.

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

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

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

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.

But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.

One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.

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.

I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.

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.

I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.

Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

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

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.

I carry the bars within me.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is nearing his end and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.

It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

Please — consider me a dream.

You, who can't do anything, think you can bring off something like that? How can you even dare to think about it? If you were capable of it, you certainly wouldn't be in need of it.

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

Writing means revealing oneself to excess.

I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

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

Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.