Franz Kafka Quotes

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

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

Evil is whatever distracts.

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

I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.

Writing [is] a form of prayer.

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.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

The worries that are the burden of which the privileged person makes an excuse in dealing with the oppressed person are in fact the worries about preserving his privileged condition.

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.

I, however, cannot force myself to use "meat drugs" to cheat on my loneliness.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

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

One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

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

I made the remark that I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.

Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

"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.

I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

The true word leads; the untrue misleads.

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.

Religions get lost as people do.

Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

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

The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.

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.

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

The limited circle is pure.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.

He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.

From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.

You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.

What am I doing here in this endless winter?

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.