Franz Kafka Quotations | Page 4

He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.

I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.

I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.

Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.

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.

Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.

You can choose to be free , but it's last decision you'll ever make

If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

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

Evil is whatever distracts.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

The limited circle is pure.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.

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

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.

First impressions are always unreliable.

But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.

His biggest misgiving came from his concern about the loud crash that was bound to occur and would probably create, if not terror, at least anxiety behind all the doors. But that would have to be risked.

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.

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.

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.

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.

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.

It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

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.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.

He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.

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.

I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.

Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer.

Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.

They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands the unfitness of the means. The ulterior motives with which youabsorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.... Evil is whatever distracts. Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has. One means that Evil has is the dialogue.... One cannot pay Evil in installments--and one always keeps on trying to.

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

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.

Torment yourself as little as possible, then you'll torment me less.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

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

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

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

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Writing means revealing oneself to excess.

Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; it keeps hap­pen­ing; in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.

Only the moment counts. It determines life.

Writers speak stench.

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.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

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.

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. 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. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.

I am free and that is why I am lost.

Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.

Books are a narcotic.

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

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

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

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

Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.

There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.

Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.