Franz Kafka Quotes
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Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.
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Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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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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Please — consider me a dream.
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I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.
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By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
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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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Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
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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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You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
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Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
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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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Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
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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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Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
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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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Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.
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I carry the bars within me.
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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
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From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
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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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'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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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.