Franz Kafka Quotes
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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 lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
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Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.
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Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.
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Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
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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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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 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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Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
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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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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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There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.
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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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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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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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Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.
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I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
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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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If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.