Quotes from Franz Kafka

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.

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

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.

Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

What is gayer than believing in a household god?

The founder brought the laws from the lawgiver; the faithful are meant to announce the laws to the lawgiver.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

They did not know what we can now guess at, contemplating the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence.