Franz Kafka Quotes

220 Sourced Quotes

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

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

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

Franz Kafka
I can't think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there's no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.

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
I'm tired, can't think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

Franz Kafka
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

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
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of the Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

Franz Kafka
Previously I did not understand why I got no answer to my question; today I do not understand how I could believe I was capable of asking. But I didn't really believe, I only asked.

Franz Kafka
One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark

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

Franz Kafka
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
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

Franz Kafka
Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.

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

Franz Kafka
Plenty of hope—for God—an abundance of hope—only not for us.

Franz Kafka
We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.

Franz Kafka