Franz Kafka Quotes

“The soul can only blossom forth to its sublime and rare capacities when it feels it is being met with faith.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“...over and over, you would like to be recognized according to your own self, your own person, your own heart's inclination-but they always ask only what you have done, and really, if you look at it rationally, they have nothing else by which they can judge your state of mind except the manifestations of that state of mind.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“The father himself didn't follow his own criticisms and rules too strictly, and this very lack of logic appears to the son, on looking back, as a sign of unruly zest for life and unbreakable will-power. 'You had worked yourself up to such a position by your own strength, that you had unlimited confidence in your own opinion...From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was right, everybody else was mad, eccentric, meshuggah, not normal. At the same time your self-confidence was so great that there was no need for you to be consistent, and yet you were always right...”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka

“If the angels made jokes in heaven it would have to be in Franz Kafka's language. This language is fire, but it leaves no soot behind. It has the sublimity of endless space, and at the same time it palpitates with every palpitation of things created.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“In my novel The Kingdom of Love, in the figure of Richard Garta I have set down very much of what remains of Kafka in my heart and memory. Write an objective biography of Kafka! - that I felt I could not do at that time, four years after his death. It is only now, after nine more years have passed, thirteen years, that is, after the catastrophe, that I can bring myself to do it. At that time, however, I lived still with my unforgettable friend, he was present with me in the truest sense of the word, always by my side, I knew exactly what he would have said in this or that situation, exactly how he would have thought about things that went on round about me. I asked him questions, and could answer myself in his name. That is how I came to feel the necessity of bringing my incomparable friend to life in the form of a living work of art, not in a historical study collecting dates and carefully piecing facts together, but as an epic figure. Above all, I wanted to bring him to life for myself in this new way. So long as I lived in this book, in working at it, he was not dead, he still lived with me and still exerted his influence on my life.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“Above all, I know this now: Art needs hard work more than hard work needs art.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“Truth is visible everywhere.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“He never pointed the way out to you by saying: 'Look, that is the right road, too.' He simply marched on with firm step, realistically, without using philosophical terms (for his thinking, as his wonderful diary shows, was generally done in the form of images), absorbed only in observing the detail which the ever-changing vistas of the road crowded in on him.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“Still today I feel that the fundamental question, 'What difference could his father's approval make to Kafka?' is put not from Kafka's point of view but from an outsider's. The fact that he did need it existed once and for all as an innate, irrefutable feeling, and its effects lasted to the end of his life as 'a general load of fear, weakness, and self-contempt.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka

“...the parents are the first problem a child comes up against, the first resistance he has to assert himself against; his arguments with them are the model for all his later fights in life.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“Кафка всегда был готов понять другого. Он с большим удовольствием следил за жизнью и карьерой своих знакомых. Он был другом для многих, но не многим позволял быть своим другом.”
― Макс Брод, Франц Кафка. Узник абсолюта