Franz Kafka Quotes
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By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
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Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
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I lack nothing. I only needed myself.
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You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
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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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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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Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.
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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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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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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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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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In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
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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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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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Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.
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Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
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Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
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From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.