Franz Kafka Quotes

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it renders everything asunder, the wall, and the bonds and its very self.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us. That is my belief.

Love is a drama of contradictions.

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless manthe most guilty.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

People who walk across dark bridges, past saints,with dim, small lights.Clouds which move across gray skiespast churcheswith towers darkened in the dusk.One who leans against granite railinggazing into the evening waters,His hands resting on old stones.

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

Books are a narcotic.

Life is hard, the earth stubborn, science rich in knowledge but poor in practical results.

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation

In a way, I was safe writing

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.

No sooner is it a little calmer with me than it is almost too calm as though I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy

One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

Nothing, nothing, the whole long day, nothing.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

The meaning of life is that it ends

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life…

It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.