Franz Kafka Quotes
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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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Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
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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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I carry the bars within me.
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Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
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Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.
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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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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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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.
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I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
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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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Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.
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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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'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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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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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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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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There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.
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'Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible,' she said, 'but that alone doesn't make it true.'
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To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.
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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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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.