Franz Kafka Quotes
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Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.
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You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
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Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
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From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
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May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
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Only the moment counts. It determines life.
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Please — consider me a dream.
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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.
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Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
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Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.
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We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.
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The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
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I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.
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To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible.
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'Hey, there’s something falling down in there,' said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had happened to him might some day also happen to the chief clerk. There was no denying that anything was possible.
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The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
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How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
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I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
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Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
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The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
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'Like a dog!' he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.
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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.
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One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.