Franz Kafka Quotes

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

~ Franz Kafka

Yours(now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)

~ Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

~ Franz Kafka

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.

~ Franz Kafka

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

~ Franz Kafka

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

~ Franz Kafka

But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak

~ Franz Kafka

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

~ Franz Kafka

The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all teeth were but ready they would not need even to bite, the bones would crack themselves and the marrow would be freely accessible to the feeblest of dogs. If I remain faithful to this metaphor, then the goal of my aims, my questions, my inquiries, appears monstrous, it is true. For I want to compel all dogs thus to assemble together, I want the bones to crack open under the pressure of their collective preparedness, and then I want to dismiss them to the ordinary life they love, while all by myself, quite alone, I lap up the marrow. That sounds monstrous, almost as if I wanted to feed on the marrow, not merely of bone, but of the whole canine race itself. But it is only a metaphor. The marrow that I am discussing here is no food; on the contrary, it is a poison.

~ Franz Kafka

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.

~ Franz Kafka

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.

~ Franz Kafka

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

~ Franz Kafka

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

~ Franz Kafka

When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon.The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.

~ 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

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

~ Franz Kafka

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

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

~ Franz Kafka

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

~ Franz Kafka

Writing is prayer.

~ Franz Kafka

In a way, I was safe writing

~ 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

Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.

~ Franz Kafka

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

~ Franz Kafka

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

~ Franz Kafka

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

~ 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

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

~ Franz Kafka

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

~ 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

And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.

~ Franz Kafka

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

~ Franz Kafka

I only fear danger where I want to fear it.

~ Franz Kafka

In general I lacked principally the ability to provide even in the slightest detail for the real future. I thought only of things in the present and their present condition, not because of thoroughness or any special, strong interest, but rather, to the extent that weakness in thinking was not the cause, because of sorrow and fear – sorrow, because the present was so sad for me that I thought I could not leave it before it resolved itself into happiness; fear, because, like my fear of the slightest action in the present, I also considered myself, in view of my contemptible, childish appearance, unworthy of forming a serious, responsible opinion of the great, manly future which usually seemed so impossible to me that every short step forward appeared to me to be counterfeit and the next step unattainable.

~ Franz Kafka

I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

~ Franz Kafka

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

~ Franz Kafka

So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.

~ Franz Kafka

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

~ Franz Kafka

You're not cross with me, though? he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, No, no, I'm never cross with anyone.

~ Franz Kafka

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

~ Franz Kafka