Franz Kafka Quotes

page 3

266 Quotes on Love, Freedom, and the Complexities of Human Existence

“Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.”

“… 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. In the Cathedral”

“Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. That is not the sort of belief that indicates real faith.”

“Please — consider me a dream.”

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”

“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.”

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

“So eager are our people to obliterate the present.”

“I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”

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

“I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.”

“I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.”

“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”

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

“I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.”

“Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.”

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

“It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet i have done so; obviously it never will be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so.”

“I lack nothing. I only needed myself.”

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

“He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”

“Writing is a deeper sleep than death.
Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave,
I can't be dragged from my desk at night.”

“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.”

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

“Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words.”

“Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”

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

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

“Writing is prayer.”

“Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”

“I like to make use of what I know”

“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!”

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

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

“No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.".”

“Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”

“My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?”

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

“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence… Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.”

“Go on caring for me.”

“…it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.”

“Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.”

“My "fear" is my substance, and probably the best part of me.”

“If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you.
Kafka (note to himself in journal)”

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

“And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.”

“I carry the bars within me.”

“Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.”

“… it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on Earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.”