Quotes from Franz Kafka

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.

I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

Evil is whatever distracts.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

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.

The limited circle is pure.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.