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.

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 a cage, in search of a bird.

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.

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.

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

All language is but a poor translation.

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

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

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

That is the point that must be reached.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The meaning of life is that it stops.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil. The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

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

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

This tremendous world I have inside of me.

How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

First impressions are always unreliable.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.

Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

The truth is always an abyss.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.

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.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

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

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

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