Quotes from Franz Kafka

This afternoon I couldn't get out of bed, not because I was too tired but because I was too heavy - again and again that word, it's the only one that fits me, do you understand this at all? It's something like the "heaviness" of a ship which has lost its rudder and which says to the waves: I'm too heavy for myself and for you too light.

A piece like a segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun looks in and the whole world with it. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and moreover it irritates him that he should be the very one excluded from the spectacle.

when I try to write down something like the following, the swords whose points surround me in a circle, begin slowly to approach the body, it's the most complete torture; when they begin to graze me, I don't mean pierce, when they merely begin to graze me it's already so terrible that I immediately, at the first scream, betray you, myself, everything.

Milena who is constantly discovering in herself that the only way to save another person is by being there and nothing else.

One learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition.

How lonely it is here, and how well it suits you.

Evil has ways of surprising one. Suddenly it turns round and says: "You have misunderstood me," and perhaps it really is so. Evil transforms itself into your own lips, lets itself be gnawed at by your teeth, and with these new lips -- no former ones fitted smoothly to your gums -- to your own amazement you utter the words of goodness.

One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark

all that matters is that the wound fit the arrow

WHEN Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.

Without any way out, not even toward the depth.

I am never serious, and therefore I have to make jokes do duty both for jest and earnest.

In the mountains our throats become free. It's a wonder we don't break into song.

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.

Incidentally, it's easy to write prescriptions, but difficult to come to an understanding with people.

Es perfectamente imaginable que el esplendor de la vida esté dispuesto, siempre en toda plenitud, alrededor de cada uno, pero cubierto de un velo, en las profundidades, invisible, muy lejos. Sin embargo está ahí, no hostil, no a disgusto, no sordo, viene si uno lo llama con la palabra correcta, por su nombre correcto. Es la esencia de la magia, que no crea, sino llama.

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.

You aren't tired at all, just restless, just afraid of taking one step on this Earth teeming with pitfalls, which is why you always keep both feet in the air at once, you aren't tired, just afraid of the terrible fatigue which will follow this terrible restlessness ...

And yet the fear!

Alone I continue living, yet when a visitor arrives it kills me.

When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day.

It's characteristic of this judicial system that a man is condemned not only when he's innocent but also in ignorance.

Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur noch solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.

È ridicolo come ti sei bardato per questo mondo.