Franz Kafka Quotes

there is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak

That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand.

I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.

This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, also appeared to carry freedom around with it.

Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.

You too have weapons.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

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.

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.

The founder brought the laws from the lawgiver; the faithful are meant to announce the laws to the lawgiver.

it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.

The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.

Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.

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

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.

There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.

The true way goes over a line that, rather than spanning heights, is hardly above the ground. It appears more decidedly to make one trip than to be walked along.

If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

Yours(now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]

Writing is prayer.

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

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

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

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

I only fear danger where I want to fear it.

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

So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free, ’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it.

Was he a beast if music could move him so?

Today one may pluck out one's very heart and not find it.

my heart no longer beats but is a tugging muscle,

Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. ("America: Three Audiences")

My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.

[He] used to be so insignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence.

[He] used to be soinsignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence.

The meaning of life is that it ends

I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insa

Fear of night. Fear of not night.

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.