Franz Kafka Literature Quotations

The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Writers speak stench.

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

Evil is whatever distracts.

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.

Religions get lost as people do.