110+ Franz Kafka Quotes On Death, Bureaucracy And Books

Franz Kafka was an Austrian novelist who wrote in German and is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His works, such as The Metamorphosis and The Trial, are filled with themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and absurdity. His writing style has been influential on subsequent generations of writers, and his works have been adapted into numerous films, plays, and television series. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Franz Kafka on death, love, bureaucracy.

Top 10 Franz Kafka Quotes

1. 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.
2. I am a cage, in search of a bird.
3. 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.
4. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
5. Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
6. All language is but a poor translation.
7. The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
8. From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
9. There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.
10. I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.

Franz Kafka Short Quotes

• Paths are made by walking
• Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
• Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
• The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
• Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
• Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
• First impressions are always unreliable.
• If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.
• Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
• The truth is always an abyss.

Franz Kafka Quotes About Death

The meaning of life is that it stops. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death. — Franz Kafka

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body. — Franz Kafka

Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night. — Franz Kafka

The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one. — Franz Kafka

Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world. — Franz Kafka

My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree. — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Quotes About Love

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. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. — Franz Kafka

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself. — Franz Kafka

There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us. — Franz Kafka

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one. — Franz Kafka

Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer. — Franz Kafka

I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it. — Franz Kafka

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects. — Franz Kafka

Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road. — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty. — Franz Kafka

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

Franz Kafka Quotes About Books

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

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. — Franz Kafka

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. — Franz Kafka

I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance. — Franz Kafka

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us. — Franz Kafka

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? — Franz Kafka

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? — Franz Kafka

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

A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us. — Franz Kafka

We need the books that affect us like a disaster — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Quotes About World

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. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you. — Franz Kafka

The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me. — Franz Kafka

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not. — Franz Kafka

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world. — Franz Kafka

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world. — Franz Kafka

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

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world. — Franz Kafka

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive. — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Quotes About Fact

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. — Franz Kafka

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. — Franz Kafka

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite. — Franz Kafka

The worries that are the burden of which the privileged person makes an excuse in dealing with the oppressed person are in fact the worries about preserving his privileged condition. — Franz Kafka

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal. — Franz Kafka

The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty. — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Quotes About True

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

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

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you. To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever. — Franz Kafka

The true word leads; the untrue misleads. — Franz Kafka

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it. — Franz Kafka

One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay. — Franz Kafka

It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true. — Franz Kafka

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else. — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Quotes About Word

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. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief." — Franz Kafka

Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it. — Franz Kafka

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me. — Franz Kafka

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it. — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

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

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

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. — Franz Kafka

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

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. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

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

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

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. — Franz Kafka

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

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

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

Sometimes I'd like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket. then open it to see if they've suffocated — Franz Kafka

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return. — Franz Kafka

Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being. — Franz Kafka

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists. — Franz Kafka

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow? — Franz Kafka

Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent. — Franz Kafka

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph. — Franz Kafka

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones. — Franz Kafka

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

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer. — Franz Kafka

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

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened. — Franz Kafka

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity. — Franz Kafka

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man. — Franz Kafka

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

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence. — Franz Kafka

The Diabolical sometimes assumes the aspect of the Good, or even embodies itself completely in its form. If this remains concealedfrom me, I am of course defeated, for this Good is more tempting than the genuine Good. — Franz Kafka

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler. — Franz Kafka

My fear... is my substance, and probably the best part of me. — Franz Kafka

Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes 'fast' like a watch - sometimes. — Franz Kafka

We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed. — Franz Kafka

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted. — Franz Kafka

Evil is whatever distracts. — Franz Kafka

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm. — Franz Kafka

They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong — Franz Kafka

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

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

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood. — Franz Kafka

Writing means revealing oneself to excess. — Franz Kafka

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery. — Franz Kafka

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward. — Franz Kafka

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible. — Franz Kafka

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself. — Franz Kafka

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places. — Franz Kafka

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation. — Franz Kafka

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness. — Franz Kafka

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings. — Franz Kafka

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself. — Franz Kafka

The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred. — Franz Kafka

I, however, cannot force myself to use "meat drugs" to cheat on my loneliness. — Franz Kafka

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment. — Franz Kafka

The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts. — Franz Kafka

Life Lessons by Franz Kafka

1. Franz Kafka taught us to embrace our own unique perspective and to never be afraid to challenge the status quo. He also encouraged us to be mindful of our own mortality and to make the most of our time here on earth. Finally, he showed us that it is often the struggles we face that give our lives meaning and purpose.