Franz Kafka Quotes

220 Sourced Quotes

No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won't see a thing.".

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
Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.

Franz Kafka
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.

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
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
Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one's memory.

Franz Kafka
Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.

Franz Kafka
Looking on oneself as something alien, forgetting the sight, remembering the gaze.

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
There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.

Franz Kafka
"You asking me the way?" "Yes," I said, "since I can't find it myself." "Give it up! Give it up!" said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

Franz Kafka
The founder brought the laws from the lawgiver; the faithful are meant to announce the laws to the lawgiver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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