Franz Kafka Quotes

220 Sourced Quotes

It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.

Franz Kafka
If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

Franz Kafka
I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

Franz Kafka
My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

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

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

Franz Kafka
To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.

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

Franz Kafka
Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.

Franz Kafka
Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.

Franz Kafka
Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.

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
The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

Franz Kafka
That is what people are like in my district. Always expecting the impossible from the doctor. They have lost their ancient beliefs; the parson sits at home and unravels his vestments, one for another; but the doctor is supposed to be omnipotent with his merciful surgeon's hands. Well, as it pleases them; I have not thrust my services on them.

Franz Kafka
Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.

Franz Kafka
For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.

Franz Kafka
There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.

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

Franz Kafka
This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, also appeared to carry freedom around with it.

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
Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.

Franz Kafka
All science is methodology with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It is a husk, but not more than everything except the One.

Franz Kafka
Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one's own castle.

Franz Kafka
He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.

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

Franz Kafka
If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually be at the station by eight o'clock.

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
If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

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

Franz Kafka