Franz Kafka Quotes

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

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

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.

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 usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.

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

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.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

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

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

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

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

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

What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Evil is whatever distracts.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

My 'fear' is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.

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

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

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

The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.

Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.