Quotes from Franz Kafka

After tormenting myself for a long time, I am stopping. I am unable and in the near future will scarcely be able to complete the remaining pieces.

Then birds flew up like a shower of sparks, I followed them with my eyes and saw how they rose in a single breath, until they seemed no longer to be rising but I to be falling...

Of course I'm ignorant, that remains true at all events and is extremely distressing for me, but it does have the advantage that the ignorant man dares more, so I shall gladly put up with ignorance and its undoubtedly dire consequences for a while, as long as my strength lasts.

those who are ignorant naturally consider everything possible.

These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.

Agreement is the best weapon of defense?and the matter would be buried.

Anyway, it's best not to think about them, as if you do it makes the discussions with the other lawyers, all their advice and all that they do manage to achieve, seem so unpleasant and useless, I had that experience myself, just wanted to throw everything away and lay at home in bed and hear nothing more about it. But that, of course, would be the stupidest thing you could do, and you wouldn't be left in peace in bed for very long either.

Oh God, I wish you were not on this earth, but entirely within me, or rather that I were not on this earth, but entirely within you; I feel there is one too many of us; the separation into two people is unbearable.

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all.

When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?

It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?

In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world. (Im Kampf zwischen Dir und der Welt, sekundiere der Welt)

They were given the choice of becoming kings or the king's messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless.

And what I really intended to say in the end remains unsaid.

And I close my eyes to gaze into those depths, and am almost engulfed in you.

He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.

Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.

I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.

I have discovered your great wound. You are dying from this flower blooming on your side.

He looked sadly down at the street, as though it were his own bottomless sadness.

I was reading my destiny inside your eyes without knowing it.

Logic is of course unshakeable, but it cannot hold out against a man who wants to live.

Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn't know the law and at the same time insists he's innocent.

Gece gündüz, uykuda olsun, uyan?k olsun, vücuduna saplanm?? bir oku ta??mak demek. Çekilir ÅŸey deÄŸil bu.