Franz Kafka (quotes) - Wisdom Trove

Books are a narcotic.
Writers speak stench.
Writer speaks a stench.
Paths are made by walking
Evil is whatever distracts.
In a way, I was safe writing
The truth is always an abyss.
Writing is a form of prayer.
Please consider me a dream.
Kill me, or you are a murderer.
Religions get lost as people do.
I am a cage, in search of a bird.
I like to make use of what I know
I never wish to be easily defined.
Love is a drama of contradictions.
Dread of night. Dread of not-night.
One reads in order to ask questions
Evil is the starry sky of the Good.
I am free and that is why I am lost.
The meaning of life is that it stops.
I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.
No one can crave what truly harms him.
I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.
Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
All language is but a poor translation.
Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.
First impressions are always unreliable.
The true word leads; the untrue misleads.
The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.
Writing means revealing oneself to excess.
I do not see the world at all; I invent it.
Only the moment counts. It determines life.
Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.
What am I doing here in this endless winter?
They say ignorance is bliss…. they’re wrong
Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light.
To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.
There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.
Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster
There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.
What is gayer than believing in a household god?
Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.
So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
What is written is merely the dregs of experience.
There’s an infinite amount of hope but not for us.
I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.
A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.
I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
What’s happened to me,’ he thought. It was no dream.
Palestine needs earth, but it does not need lawyers.
No sooner said than done – so acts your man of worth.
In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.
He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.
If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.
Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.
He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.
Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.
I’m doing badly, I’m doing well; whichever you prefer.
Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.
I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.
Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.
My ‘fear’ is my substance, and probably the best part of me.
It’s impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.
You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.
One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.
The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.
There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.
You can choose to be free , but it’s last decision you’ll ever make
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.
From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
Torment yourself as little as possible, then you’ll torment me less.
The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.
I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.
Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle – maybe there is none.
Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.
Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.
Most men are not wicked… They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.
There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.
How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?
I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.
One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.
Adam’s first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.
If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.
A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a “brief.”
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
I, however, cannot force myself to use “meat drugs” to cheat on my loneliness.
There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.
Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world.
sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.
I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.
As far as I have seen, at school…they aimed at blotting out one’s individuality.
When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.
There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.
In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
True undoubting is the teacher’s part, continual undoubting the part of the pupil.
It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.
What do I have in common with Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn’t make it true.
There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
Just because your doctor has a name for your condition, doesn’t mean he knows what it is.
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.
Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.
What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.
There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.
I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.
Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.
If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.
The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
If this is what you came for, then I didn’t send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.
I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.
Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.
The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
You need not even listen, just wait…the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.
The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.
Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.
But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.
I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.
In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.
I’m thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.
By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.
It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.
Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.
There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.
Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.
Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?
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.
The founder brought the laws from the lawgiver; the faithful are meant to announce the laws to the lawgiver.
Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one’s memory.
We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.
So then you’re free?’ Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.
I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.
Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.
A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.
One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark
I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.
Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
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.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.
Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.
There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.
The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.
In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion.
You’re not cross with me, though?” he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, “No, no, I’m never cross with anyone.
Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.
Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.
there is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak
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.
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.
Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.
It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.
No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.”.
If education tries to make other persons out of us than we essentially are, deeper inside, it stultifies, and reproach matters.
Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my desk at night.
One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.
Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one’s ability to do so.
At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?
This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, also appeared to carry freedom around with it.
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.
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.
One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.
Sometimes I’d like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket. then open it to see if they’ve suffocated
The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug.
Utterance does not in principle mean a weakening of conviction–that would not be anything to be deplored–but a weakness of conviction.
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.
In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
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.
Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let goof the earth.
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often ‚Äî and in my inmost self perhaps all the time ‚Äî I doubt whether I am a human being.
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.
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.
Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.
Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes ‘fast’ like a watch – sometimes.
There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.
Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr’s death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr’s death.
I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.
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 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.
We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.
I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read 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.
I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don’t stare so into complete emptiness. Only in this way is there any possibility of improvement for me.
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.
Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.
It’s sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it’s at all possible ever to have any success in one’s work here.
Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.
The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.
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.
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.
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.
The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
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.
It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.
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.
April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone – never.
The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.
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 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.
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.
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.
The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
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.
For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one’ s every word.
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.
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 speakes he lies.
All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One.
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence… someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer.
“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.
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 am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.
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.
Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.
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.
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 whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man’s wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.
The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.
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.
A picture of my existence… would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow… stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.
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.
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.
The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.
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.
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
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.
He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.
The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.
The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go – not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.
We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.
I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more
Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
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.
His biggest misgiving came from his concern about the loud crash that was bound to occur and would probably create, if not terror, at least anxiety behind all the doors. But that would have to be risked.
I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.
The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.
We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us. What was ordained for us has been changed; it is not said that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise.”
Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer.
In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.
The Diabolical sometimes assumes the aspect of the Good, or even embodies itself completely in its form. If this remains concealedfrom me, I am of course defeated, for this Good is more tempting than the genuine Good.
I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.
Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.
To every instant there is a correspondence in something outside time. This world here and now cannot be followed by a Beyond, for the Beyond is eternal, hence it cannot be in temporal contact with this world here and now.
The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.
If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you’re okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don’t let them go. People like that are hard to find.
Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.
In one and the same human being there are cognitions that, however utterly dissimilar they are, yet have one and the same object,so that one can only conclude that there are different subjects in one and the same human being.
Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.
Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens.
The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
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.
If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually be at the station by eight o’clock.
For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.
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.
Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him … he won’t understand a word of it.
And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.
One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.
In Paradise, as always: that which causes the sin and that which recognizes it for what it is are one. The clear conscience is Evil, which is so entirely victorious that it does not any longer consider the leap from left to right necessary.
If all responsibility is imposed on you, then you may want to exploit the moment and want to be overwhelmed by the responsibility;yet if you try, you will notice that nothing was imposed on you, but that you are yourself this responsibility.
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.
The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.
For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.
Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
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.
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.
There’s no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!
It is strange how little sharpsightedness women possess; they only notice whether they please, then whether they arouse pity, and finally, whether you look for compassion from them. That is all; come to think of it, it may even be enough, generally speaking.
Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.
Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.
People who walk across dark bridges, past saints, with dim, small lights. Clouds which move across gray skies past churches with towers darkened in the dusk. One who leans against granite railing gazing into the evening waters, His hands resting on old stones.
it was like this. the brain could no longer bear the worries and pains that were imposed on it. it said: “i’m giving up; but if there is anyone else here who is interested in preserving the whole, let him assume part of my burden and it will be alright for a bit.
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.
German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.
My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.
“The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.

The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.”
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That’s why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.
The truth is always an abyss. One must ‚Äî as in a swimming pool ‚Äî dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again ‚Äî laughing and fighting for breath ‚Äî to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
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.
I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.
The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.
My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.
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.
I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.
. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.
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.
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.
The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it. Recognition of this contact is the fact that even the soul does not know of itself. Hence it must remain unknown. That would be sad only if there were anything apart from the soul, but there is nothing else.
There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought
There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.
There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. 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. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.
And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.
My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.
and in that recurring dream, I found myself trapped in some sort of gigantic game of which I was unfamiliar with the rules; lost in a labyrinthine town of dark and damp, criss-crossing streets, ambiguous characters of uncertain authority having no idea of why I was there nor what I had to do, and where the first sign of the beginning of understanding was the wish to die.
But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.
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.
I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.
They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other – since there are no kings – messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.
It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.
People keep themselves at a tolerable height above an infernal abyss toward which they gravitate only by putting out all their strength and lovingly helping one another. They are tied together by ropes, and it’s bad enough when the ropes around an individual loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into empty space; ghastly when the ropes break and he falls. That’s why we should cling to the others.
What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm’s time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?
Writing sustains me. But wouldn’t it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn’t mean life is any better when I don’t write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don’t write – which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity.
There are two cardinal human sins out of which all others derive, deviate, and dissipate: impatience and lassitude (or perhaps nonchalance). On account of impatience they are driven out of paradise; on account of lassitude or nonchalance they do not return. Perhaps, however, only one main sense of sin is given: impatience. On account of impatience they are driven out, on account of impatience they do not turn back.
Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in theworld unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.
Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
If I didn’t have my parents to think about I’d have given in my notice a long time ago, I’d have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He’d fall right off his desk! And it’s a funny sort of business to be sitting up there at your desk, talking down at your subordinates from up there, especially when you have to go right up close because the boss is hard of hearing.
When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands the unfitness of the means. The ulterior motives with which youabsorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil…. Evil is whatever distracts. Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has. One means that Evil has is the dialogue…. One cannot pay Evil in installments–and one always keeps on trying to.
I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.
He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: “This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
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.
I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.
I don’t know who the great lawyers are, and I presume you can’t get to them. I know of no case where it can be said for certain that they took part. They defend some people, but you can’t get them to do that through your own efforts, they only defend the ones they want to defend. But I assume a case they take on must have progressed beyond the lower court. It’s better not to think of them at all, otherwise you’ll find the consultations with the other lawyers, their advice and their assistance, extremely disgusting and useless.
I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.

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About Franz Kafka

Quotes by Franz Kafka