Quotes from Franz Kafka

Down Here and up there are all the same to me. Whether I lie here in the gutter and stow away the rain water or drink champagne up there with the same lips makes no difference to me, not even in the taste.

In this love you are like a knife with which I explore myself.

I can't sleep and the rain is determined not to quit soliloquizing about you all night. I can't help but overhear, my dear.

I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one's own castle.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

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.

This afternoon the pain occasioned by my loneliness came upon me so piercingly and intensely that I became aware that the strength which I gain through this writing thus spends itself, a strength which I certainly have not intended for this purpose.

In that case, I'll miss the thing by waiting for it.

I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.

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

I am nothing but literature, and can and want to be nothing else.

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

Es gibt unendlich viel Hoffnung, nur nicht für uns.

You do not need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? (...) We need the 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 inside us.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

If he stayed at home and carried on with his normal life he would be a thousand times superior to these people and could get any of them out of his way just with a kick.

Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.

One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.

Devilish in my innocence.

If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place?.... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. --Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904

The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.

all [the authorities] did was to guard the distant and invisible interests of distant and invisible masters