Franz Kafka Quotes

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.

If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you're okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don't let them go. People like that are hard to find.

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.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

Just because your doctor has a name for your condition, doesn't mean he knows what it is.

Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.

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.

It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

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.

I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.

I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

I am free and that is why I am lost.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

I’m doing badly, I’m doing well; whichever you prefer.

All language is but a poor translation.

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.

The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.

I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

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.

There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.

Paths are made by walking

Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.

Please — consider me a dream.

It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

I do not see the world at all; I invent it.

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.