Franz Kafka > Quotes

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“Books are a narcotic.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
― Franz Kafka

“Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”
― Franz Kafka

“…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.”
― Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka's The Castle

“L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.”
― Franz Kafka

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”
― Franz Kafka

“Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”
― Franz Kafka

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
― Franz Kafka

“Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”
― Franz Kafka

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
― Franz Kafka

“I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.”
― Franz Kafka

“They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong ”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“Love is a drama of contradictions.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.”
― Franz Kafka

“First impressions are always unreliable.”
― Franz Kafka

“Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.”
― Franz Kafka

“God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.”
― Franz Kafka

“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”
― Franz Kafka

“Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.”
― Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“Kill me, or you are a murderer.”
― Franz Kafka

“Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”
― Franz Kafka

“So eager are our people to obliterate the present.”
― Franz Kafka

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka