The Diaries of Franz Kafka Quotes

“When I say something it immediately and definitively loses its importance, when I write it down it always loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even those who demand it) are like usurers, they are happy to risk the capital as long as they get the interest.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I avoid people not in order to be able to live in peace, but in order to be able to die in peace.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Silent, not from embarrassment or any other reason, but simply silent.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“The contentment today in my room. Hollow as a shell on the beach, ready to be crushed by a footstep”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I must be alone a great deal. What I have achieved is only a result of being alone.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times better to be torn to pieces than to retain or bury it in me. That’s why I’m here, after all, that’s completely clear to me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“This evening out of boredom washed my hands three times in succession in the bathroom.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Yesterday evening during a walk every little street noise, every glance directed at me, every photograph in a display case was more important to me than I was.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Indubitable in me is the greed for books. Not so much to own or to read them as to see them, to convince myself in a bookseller’s display of their continued existence. When there are several copies of the same book somewhere every single one gives me pleasure. It’s as if this greed came from my stomach, as if it were a misdirected appetite. Books I own give me less pleasure, whereas my sisters’ books do give me pleasure. The longing to own them is incomparably smaller, it’s almost absent.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“My condition is not unhappiness, but it’s not happiness either, not indifference not weakness, not fatigue, not interest in anything else, so what is it then? The fact that I don’t know is probably connected with my inability to write. And this is something I think I understand without knowing its cause.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“It is always the same, always the same”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“The distraction, the weakness of memory, the stupidity!”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I hide away from people not because I want to live in peace but because I want to perish in peace.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“There are possibilities for me, certainly, but under what stone do they lie?”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I was wise, if you will, because I was prepared to die at any moment, but this was not because I had taken care of everything I was required to do, but rather because I had done none of it and also couldn’t hope ever to do any of it.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today, when the possibility of surveying our condition at that time does make us wiser, but we therefore must recognize all the more the undauntedness of our striving at that time, which in sheer ignorance nonetheless sustained itself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“can venture nothing for myself as long as I have achieved no greater work that satisfies me fully. That is certainly irrefutable.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I'm restless and poisonous.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I fall asleep easily, but after an hour I wake up as if I had laid my head in a false hole. I'm completely awake, have the feeling of having slept not at all or only under a thin skin, have the work of falling asleep ahead of me anew and feel rejected by sleep. And the rest of the night until toward 5 it goes on in such a way that I do sleep but at the same time intense dreams keep me awake. I am practically sleeping next to myself, while I myself must grapple with dreams. Toward 5 the last trace of sleep is used up, I only dream, which is a greater strain than being awake. In short I spend the whole night in the state in which a healthy person finds himself for a little while before actually falling asleep.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“My condition is not unhappiness, but it’s not happiness either, not indifference not weakness, not fatigue, not interest in anything else, so what is it then? The fact that I don’t know is probably connected with my inability to write.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“To be sure, the deeper one digs one’s pit, the quieter it becomes; the less anxious one becomes, the quieter it becomes.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“On the way home I told Max that on my deathbed provided that the pains are not too great, I will be very content. I forgot to add and later omitted intentionally that the best of what I have written stems from this ability to die contentedly. All those good and strongly convincing passages always deal with the fact that someone is dying, that this is very difficult for him, that in it he experiences an injustice and at least a hardship and that for the reader at least in my opinion this is moving. For me, however, believing as I do in my ability to be content on my deathbed, such depictions are secretly a game, indeed I am happy to die in the dying man, therefore calculatingly take advantage of the attention the reader concentrates on death, am far more clearheaded than he, who I assume will lament on his deathbed, and my lament is therefore as perfect as possible, does not, for example, suddenly break off like a real lament, but rather trails away beautifully and purely. It’s like my perpetual lamenting to my mother over woes not nearly as great as the lament led one to believe. For my mother, to be sure, I didn’t need as much artistic effort as for the reader.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“One stands painfully pinned against the wall, fearfully lowers one’s eyes to see the hand that pins and with a new pain that makes one forget the old, recognizes one’s own crooked hand, which holds you with a strength it never had for good work. One raises one’s head, again feels the first pain, again lowers one’s eyes and this up and down never ceases.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“being alone brings only punishments.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“The most widespread individuality of writers consists, after all, in the fact that each conceals his bad qualities in an entirely particular way.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“how much harmful ridiculous self-confidence arises while reading old things with an eye to publication.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Weightlessly, bonelessly, bodilessly walked for two hours through the streets”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“In what an effortless sleepiness I wrote this useless, unfinished thing.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Stauffer-Bern:[351] “The sweetness of production obscures its absolute value.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka