Franz Kafka Quotes

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.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

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

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

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

I am free and that is why I am lost.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.

All language is but a poor translation.

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

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity." [Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

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

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.

Books are a narcotic.

Paths are made by walking

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

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

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us. That is my belief.

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

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

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

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 never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.

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.

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

How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense",

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

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

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

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

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.

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

They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong

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

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.

In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.

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

April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

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.

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

I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

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

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

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.

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

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

Love is a drama of contradictions.

First impressions are always unreliable.

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

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.

You are free and that is why you are lost.

Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

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

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.

What am I doing here in this endless winter?

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

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

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

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.

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.

it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.

For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.

Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.

I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

Please — consider me a dream.

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.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication--it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness--it is all that I have--and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

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.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

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

Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.

The limited circle is pure.

You misinterpret everything, even the silence.

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

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.

If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.

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.

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.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?

He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.

When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day; a couple, however, does not have to put up with it. Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time it’s really not that bad; that’s an exaggeration and a lie, everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it’s really an expression for everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it’s true. Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most - you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

Franz Kafka is Dead He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children's hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees , Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone. They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.