Franz Kafka Quotes & Sayings

Without any way out, not even toward the depth. — 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

Kafkaesque

The term's meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical. — Franz Kafka

So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don't worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don't stop climbing, the stairs won't end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards — Franz Kafka

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

Logic is of course unshakeable, but it cannot hold out against a man who wants to live. — Franz Kafka

And don't demand any sincerity from me, Milena. No one can demand it from me more than I myself and yet many things elude me, I'm sure, perhaps everything eludes me. — Franz Kafka

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

Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let goof the earth. — Franz Kafka

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

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. — Franz Kafka

Writer speaks a stench. — Franz Kafka

All that matters is that the wound fit the arrow — Franz Kafka

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness. — Franz Kafka

I have now, and have had since this afternoon, a great yearning to write all of my anxiety entirely out of me. — Franz Kafka

Such a young trial! — Franz Kafka

Nothing, nothing,
the whole long day, nothing. — Franz Kafka

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

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. — Franz Kafka

Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally. — Franz Kafka

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. — Franz Kafka

I passed by the brothel as though
past the house of a beloved. — Franz Kafka

In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world's coat. — Franz Kafka

Above all, he could not stop half way, that was nonsense not only in business but always and everywhere. — Franz Kafka

Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void ... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void ... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it. — Franz Kafka

Before setting foot in the Holy of the Holies you must take off your shoes, yet not only your shoes, but everything; you must take off your traveling-garment and lay down your luggage; and under that you must shed your nakedness and everything that is under the nakedness and everything that hides beneath that, and then the core and the core of the core, then the remainder and then the residue and then even the Holy of the Holies and let yourself be absorbed by it; neither can resist the other. — Franz Kafka

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

My heart no longer beats but is a tugging muscle, — Franz Kafka

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable. — 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

I was heading for the city in the south, of which they used to say in our village:
'There are people for you! Just think - they never go to sleep!'
'And why don't they?'
'Because they're fools.'
'Don't fools get tired, then?'
'How could fools get tired? — Franz Kafka

Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light. — Franz Kafka

I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can. — Franz Kafka

But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are. — Franz Kafka

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

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support. — Franz Kafka

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free. — Franz Kafka

Books are a narcotic. — Franz Kafka

In the fight between you and the world, back the world. — Franz Kafka

We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us.
What was ordained for us has been changed; it is not said
that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise. — Franz Kafka

And, incidentally: freedom is all too often self-deception among people. Just as freedom is among the most exalted of feelings, so the corresponding deception is among the most exalted of deceptions. — Franz Kafka

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

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution. — Franz Kafka

He is afraid the shame will outlive him. — 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

4 December. To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility. — Franz Kafka

He had vented all his woes and now they might as well see the few rags that covered his body, after which they could carry him away. — Franz Kafka

Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres. — Franz Kafka

His escape is ultimately doomed by his utter devotion to his family, which never diminishes. The guilt brought on by Gregor's newfound inability to provide for his family- financially and emotionally- prevents him from attaining any sort of liberation. Perhaps recognizing this conundrum, Gregor chooses to remain an insect. — Franz Kafka

Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man
the most guilty. — Franz Kafka

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you. — Franz Kafka

Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones. — Franz Kafka

I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but cannot stay up there for more than a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying. — Franz Kafka

Seen with the terrestrially sullied eye, we are in a situation of travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties. Round about us, however, in the confusion of our senses, or in the supersensitiveness of our senses, we have nothing but monstrosities and a kaleidoscopic play of things that is either delightful or exhausting according to the mood and injury of each individual. What shall I do? or: Why should I do it? are not questions to be asked in such places. — Franz Kafka

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

Once Kafka came to regard any philosophy as nothing more than a system of rules to be enforced, a dogma both bigger and smaller than himself, he withdrew from it. — Franz Kafka

One does not have to believe everything is true, one only has to believe it is necessary. — Franz Kafka

And yet the fear! — Franz Kafka

Judgement does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement. — Franz Kafka

I made the remark that I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly. — Franz Kafka

All [the authorities] did was to guard the distant and invisible interests of distant and invisible masters — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes. — 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

[Love] has as few problems as a motocar. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road. — Franz Kafka

2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart. — Franz Kafka

Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for. — Franz Kafka

The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us. — Franz Kafka

He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive. — Franz Kafka

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit. — Franz Kafka

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt. — Franz Kafka

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us. That is my belief. — Franz Kafka

In the mountains our throats become free. It's a wonder we don't break into song. — 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

However, even this would not have helped me had I not remembered that I was loved by a girl with a black velvet ribbon around her neck, if not passionately, at least faithfully. — Franz Kafka

Guilt is never to be doubted. — Franz Kafka

Sometimes in his arrogance he has more anxiety for the world than for himself. — Franz Kafka

But the condemned man looked so submissively doglike that it seemed as if he might have been allowed to run free on the slopes and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin. — Franz Kafka

You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair. — Franz Kafka

When K. looked at the castle, often it seemed to him as if he were observing someone who sat quietly there in front of him gazing, not lost in thought and so oblivious of everything, but free and untroubled, as if he were alone with nobody to observe him, and yet must notice that he was observed, and all the same remained with his calm not even slightly disturbed; and really - one did not know whether it was cause or effect - the gaze of the observer could not remain concentrated there, but slid away. — Franz Kafka

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind
for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive
even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing.
Writing that springs from the surface of existence
when there is no other way and deeper wells have dried up
is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes the surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. — 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

Scratch your flesh raw between your toes, but you won't find the answer. — 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

The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens.This is certainly true,but it proves nothing against the heavens,because heaven means precisely:the impossibility of crows. — 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

ALAS," said the mouse, "the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up. Translated — Franz Kafka

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us. — Franz Kafka

And now you intend to stay here with us in Riva?' asked the burgomaster. 'I do not,' said the hunter with a smile, and to excuse the jest he laid his hand on the burgomaster's knee. 'I am here, more than that I do not know. My boat has no rudder, it is driven by the wind that blows in the nethermost regions of death. — Franz Kafka

I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don't stare so into complete emptiness. Only in this way is there any possibility of improvement for me. — Franz Kafka

It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves. — Franz Kafka

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before. — Franz Kafka

WHEN Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect. — Franz Kafka

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

In the morning and in the evening and at night in his dreams, this street was filled with constantly bustling traffic, which seen from above seemed like a continually self-replenishing mixture of distorted human figures and of the roofs of all sorts of vehicles, constantly scattered by new arrivals, out of which there arose a new, stronger, wilder mixture of noise, dust, and smells, and, catching and penetrating it all, a powerful light that was continually dispersed, carried away, and avidly refracted by the mass of objects that made such a physical impression on one's dazzled eye that it seemed as if a glass pane, hanging over the street and converging everything, were being smashed again and again with the utmost force. — 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

Writing sustains me. But wouldn't it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn't mean life is any better when I don't write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don't write - which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity. — Franz Kafka

But then - I was just following him in reverie over mountain and valley - he jumped with both feet onto the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, utterly uncomprehending. Who was it? A child? A gymnast? A daredevil? A suicide? A tempter? An annihilator? — Franz Kafka

All that you are seeking is also seeking you — Franz Kafka

If education tries to make other persons out of us than we essentially are, deeper inside, it stultifies, and reproach matters. — Franz Kafka