Franz Kafka: Trending quotes (page 4)

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

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

“All language is but a poor translation.”

“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.”

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

“the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective "kafkaesque”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Yours

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“Paths are made by walking”

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

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