Conversations with Kafka Quotes

“It is literature,’ said Kafka smiling. ‘Flight from reality.’
‘So poetry is lies?’
‘No. Poetry is a condensate, an essence. Literature, on the other hand, is a relaxation, a means of pleasure which alleviates the unconscious life, a narcotic.’
‘And poetry?’
‘Poetry is exactly the opposite. Poetry is an awakening.’
‘So poetry tends towards religion.’
'I would not say that. But certainly to prayer.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Tired but happy. There is nothing more beautiful than some straightforward, concrete, generally useful trade...Intellectual labor tears a man out of human society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him towards men. What a pity I can no longer work in the workshop or in the garden.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“The only definite thing is suffering.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Nothing sticks so fast in the mind as a groundless sense of guilt, because - since it has no real foundation - one cannot eliminate it by any form of repentance or redemption.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Do you know about Poe's Life?"

"I only know what I've been told by Kampf. It seems that Poe was a notorious drunkard."

Kafka frowned.

"Poe was ill. He was a poor devil who had no defenses against the world. So he fled into drunkenness. Imagination only served him as a crutch. He wrote tales of mystery to make himself at home in the world. That's perfectly natural. Imagination has fewer pitfalls than reality does.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“You describe the poet as a great and wonderful man whose feet are on the ground, while his head disappears in the clouds. Of course, that is a perfectly ordinary image drawn within the intellectual framework of lower-middle-class convention. It is an illusion based on wish fulfillment, which has nothing in common with reality. In fact, the poet is always much smaller and weaker than the social average. Therefore he feels the burden of earthly existence much more intensely and strongly than other men. For him personally his song is only a scream. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. He is not a giant, but only a more or less brightly plumaged bird in the cage of his existence.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Crossing a rainswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch:
'Life is as infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one's personal existence. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Words prepare the way for deeds to come, detonate future explosions.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“What one writes is only the ashes of one’s experience.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“الأمر الفظيع حول الحرب هو ذوبان كل الحقائق والأعراف الموجودة. الحيواني والجسدي ينموان تماماً ويخنقان كل ما هو روحي مثل السرطان.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“إن الشاعر دائماً أصغر وأضعف من المعدّل الاجتماعي. لهذا فهو يشعر بوطأة الوجود الدنيوي بشكل أكثر تركيزاً وقوة من بقية الناس.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“لا توجد قصص خرافية بلا دم. كل قصة خرافية تأتي من أعماق الدم والخوف. كل القصص الخرافية متشابهة في هذا. يختلف السطح فقط.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“One cannot break one’s chains when there are no chains to be seen. One’s imprisonment is therefore organized as a perfectly ordinary, not over-comfortable form of daily life. Everything looks as if it were made of solid, lasting stuff. But on the contrary it is a life in which one is falling towards an abyss. It isn’t visible. But if one closes one’s eyes, one can hear its rush and roar.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“The world is opening out but we are driven into narrow defiles of paper. The only certainty is the chair one sits on. We live in straight lines, yet every man is in fact a labyrinth. Writing desks are beds of Procrustes. Yet we are not antique heroes. So, despite our pain, all we are is tragic comedians.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Poetry is disease," said Kafka. "Yet one does not get well by suppressing the fever. On the contrary! It's heat purifies and illuminates.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Yet a forced gaiety is much sadder than an openly acknowledged sorrow."

"Quite true. Yet sorrow has no prospects. And all that matters is prospects, hope, going forward. There is danger only in the narrow, restricted moment. Behind it lies the abyss. If one overcomes it, everything is different. Only the moment counts. It determines life.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Do you remember the old Jewish quarter?"

"As a matter of fact, I came when it had already disappeared...In us all it still lives - the dark corners, the secret alleys, shuttered windows, squalid courtyards, rowdy pubs, and sinister inns. We walk through the broad streets of the newly built town. But our steps and our glances are uncertain. Inside we tremble just as before in the ancient streets of our misery. Our heart knows nothing of the slum clearance which has been achieved. The unhealthy old Jewish town within us is far more real than the new hygienic town around us. With out eyes open we walk through a dream: ourselves only a ghost of a vanished age.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Man is not only a work of nature but is also his own artifact, a daemon who continually breaks through the established frontiers and makes visible what was hitherto in darkness.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Our superhuman greed and vanity, the hubris of our will to power. We struggle to achieve values which are not really values at all, in order to destroy things on which our whole existence as human beings depends. Therein lies a confusion which drags us into the mire and destroys us.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Do you mean that Truth is always closed to us?"
Kafka was silent...I pressed him further: 'But can we grasp it?"
'We experience it,' said Kafka, in a slightly troubled voice. 'The fact, to which we give different names, and which we try to apprehend by various processes of thought, pervades our veins, our nerves, our senses. It is within us. For that reason perhaps it's invisible. What we can really grasp is the mystery, the darkness. God dwells in it. And this is a good thing, because without the protecting darkness, we should try to overcome God. That is man's nature. The son dethrones the Father. So God must remain hidden in darkness. And because man cannot reach him, he attacks at least the darkness which surrounds the divine. He throws burning brands into the icy night. But the night is elastic like rubber. It throws them back. And by doing so it endures. The only darkness which passes away is that of the human spirit - the light and shadow of the drop of water.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“He's not impertinent," Kafka said gently, and looked at me with dark, sad eyes. "He's only afraid. So he's unjust. Fear for one's daily bread destroys one's character. That's what life is like.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Kafka loved the streets, palaces, gardens and churches of the city where he was born. He looked with joyful interest through the pages of all the books on the antiquities of Prague which I brought to him in his office. His eyes and hands literally caressed the pages of such publications, though he had read them all long before I placed them on his desk. His eyes shone with the look of a passionate collector. The past was for him not some historically dead collector's piece, but a supple instrument of knowledge, a bridge to today.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Franz Kafka loves gestures, and is therefore economical of them. A gesture of his is not an accompaniment of speech, duplicating the words, but as it were a word from an independent language of movement, a means of communication, thus in no way an involuntary reflex, but a deliberate expression of intention.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“Genuine and lasting strength consists in bearing things.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“التاريخ صُنِع من أخطاء وبطولات كل لحظة تافهة. إذا ما ألقيت حصاة في نهر سوف تنتج سلسلة من التموجات. لكن أغلب الناس يعيشون دون أن يدركوا مسؤولياتهم التي تمتد ما وراء ذواتهم. وأعتقد أن ذلك هو أصل بؤسنا.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“أن نرى التاريخ كتراكم للأحداث هو أمر لا معنى له. ما يهم هو مغزى الأحداث. لكننا لن نعثر على ذلك في الصحف. سنكتشفه في الإيمان فقط، في إضفاء الموضوعية على ما يبدو عرضياً.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“كما ينتشر الفيضان أوسع فأوسع، يصبح الماء ضحلاً ووسخاً. الثورة تتبخر، وتترك وراءها وحل بيروقراطية جديدة. قيود البشرية المعذّبة صُنِعت من شريط أحمر.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“يواجه كيركيغارد المشكلة، أمّا من أجل أن يتمتع بالحياة بشكل جمالي أو لكي يمارسها على نحو أخلاقي. لكن هذا يبدو لي إفصاحاً زائفاً عن المسألة. إن (إما \ أو) موجودة فقط في رأس سورين كيركيغارد. في الواقع يمكن للمرء أن يحقق متعة جمالية من الحياة كنتيجة للتجربة الأخلاقية المتواضعة.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“العمل الفكري الشاق يمزّق الإنسان من المجتمع الإنساني.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“ما يولد يعيش فقط. كل شيء آخر تبديد للزمن: الأدب لا يملك تبريراً للوجود.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka