Franz Kafka Quotes
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'Like a dog!' he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.
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Please — consider me a dream.
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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.
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Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
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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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The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
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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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A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
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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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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.
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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.
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If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
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A cage went in search of a bird.
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Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
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There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.
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The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
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How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.
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I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.
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One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
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Evil is a radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is a mere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
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To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.
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'Don't you want to join us?' I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. 'No, I don't,' I said.
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If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.