Franz Kafka Quotes
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I am a cage, in search of a bird.
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I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.
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Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady's cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o'clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before.
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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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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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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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You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
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To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible.
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Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
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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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Only the moment counts. It determines life.
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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 never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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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.
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There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.
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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
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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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The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.
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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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The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.
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Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
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To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.
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I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.
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From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.