On one hand, it is clear that Kafka was not an aphorist. Read Albert Camus's Notebooks or Franco-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran's various books or Kierkegaard's Either/Or, and you will encounter a great aphorist. But then, Kafka was such a great writer that he could not help hitting the target on occasion.

Kafka spent some eight months at Zurau in Czechoslovakia with his sister Ottla when he discovered he had tuberculosis. He felt some relief being away from the pressures of marriage, work, and family. During this stay in 1917-18, the only thing he wrote were the aphorisms, one to a page on onionskin paper.

Many of these aphorisms did nothing for me. I felt they probably meant more to their author in that the word choice was sometimes a bit personal. Here's a brief selection, with the number of the aphorism in square brackets at the end of each quote:

A. is terribly puffed up, he considers himself magnetically attracting to himself an ever greater array of temptations, from quarters with which he was previously wholly unacquainted. The true explanation for his condition, however, is that a great devil has taken up residence within him, and an endless stream of smaller devils and deviltons are coming to offer the great one their services. [10]

I have never been here before: my breath comes differently, the sun is outshone by a star beside it. [17]

From the true opponent, a limitless courage flows into you. [23]

There is no possessing, only an existing, only an existing that yearns for its final breath, for asphyxiation. [35]

The road is endless, there are no shortcuts and no detours, and yet everyone brings to it his own childish haste. "You must walk this ell of ground, too, you won't be spared it." [39a]

A man cannot live without a steady faith in something indestructible within him, though both the faith and the indestructible thing may remain permanently concealed from him. One of the forms of this concealment is the belief in a personal god. [50]

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 to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy. [109]

It is that last aphorism -- also the last in the collection -- that means the most to me.

Within a few years (in 1924), Kafka was dead. Even the least of his works is worth reading.