Franz Kafka: Trending quotes

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Franz Kafka: 532 quotes129 likes

“Books are a narcotic.”

“What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.”

“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.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

“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”

Franz Kafka book The Metamorphosis

Source: The Metamorphosis

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

Franz Kafka book Amerika

Source: Amerika

“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.”

Franz Kafka book The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis (1915)

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

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

“Yours

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

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

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

Franz Kafka book Letters to Felice

Variant: You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
Source: Letters to Felice‎

“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.”