Franz Kafka Quotations | Page 3

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

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

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

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.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

The limited circle is pure.

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

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

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.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

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

Evil is whatever distracts.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

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

For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.

The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

We need the books that affect us like a disaster

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.

The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.

The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.

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

Writer speaks a stench.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world...

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

I carry the bars within me.

It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.

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.

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

Paths are made by walking

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?

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

Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

I, however, cannot force myself to use "meat drugs" to cheat on my loneliness.

Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.

In Paradise, as always: that which causes the sin and that which recognizes it for what it is are one. The clear conscience is Evil, which is so entirely victorious that it does not any longer consider the leap from left to right necessary.

If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

In one and the same human being there are cognitions that, however utterly dissimilar they are, yet have one and the same object,so that one can only conclude that there are different subjects in one and the same human being.

One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.

Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes 'fast' like a watch - sometimes.

All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One.

Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in theworld unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.

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.

The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it. Recognition of this contact is the fact that even the soul does not know of itself. Hence it must remain unknown. That would be sad only if there were anything apart from the soul, but there is nothing else.

The Diabolical sometimes assumes the aspect of the Good, or even embodies itself completely in its form. If this remains concealedfrom me, I am of course defeated, for this Good is more tempting than the genuine Good.

Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.

Utterance does not in principle mean a weakening of conviction--that would not be anything to be deplored--but a weakness of conviction.

What is gayer than believing in a household god?

The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.

Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.

Writing sustains me. But wouldn’t it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn't mean life is any better when I don’t write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don’t write - which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity.

True undoubting is the teacher's part, continual undoubting the part of the pupil.

The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer.

Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.

I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.

The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.

There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.

Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.

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.

The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

To every instant there is a correspondence in something outside time. This world here and now cannot be followed by a Beyond, for the Beyond is eternal, hence it cannot be in temporal contact with this world here and now.

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.

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you. To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever.

There are two cardinal human sins out of which all others derive, deviate, and dissipate: impatience and lassitude (or perhaps nonchalance). On account of impatience they are driven out of paradise; on account of lassitude or nonchalance they do not return. Perhaps, however, only one main sense of sin is given: impatience. On account of impatience they are driven out, on account of impatience they do not turn back.

The true way goes over a line that, rather than spanning heights, is hardly above the ground. It appears more decidedly to make one trip than to be walked along.

Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.

I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.

To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.