Franz Kafka Quotations | Page 5

Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light.

I like to make use of what I know

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?

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.

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.

Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is nearing his end and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.

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

We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us. What was ordained for us has been changed; it is not said that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise.

Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.

Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.

One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.

In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion.

The founder brought the laws from the lawgiver; the faithful are meant to announce the laws to the lawgiver.

Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let goof the earth.

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

The true word leads; the untrue misleads.

Sometimes I'd like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket. then open it to see if they've suffocated

From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.

I don't know who the great lawyers are, and I presume you can't get to them. I know of no case where it can be said for certain that they took part. They defend some people, but you can't get them to do that through your own efforts, they only defend the ones they want to defend. But I assume a case they take on must have progressed beyond the lower court. It's better not to think of them at all, otherwise you'll find the consultations with the other lawyers, their advice and their assistance, extremely disgusting and useless.

You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.

I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.

I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.

There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.

It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.

There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.

The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.

It's often safer to be in chains than to be free