Quotes from Franz Kafka

My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.

It's both difficult and hard at the same time to deal with them, and there's hardly any reason for it.

Pienso que nunca antes me habías humillado tanto con tus expresiones, ni habías demostrado más fehacientemente tu desprecio (p. 64)

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

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.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.

Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

The meaning of life is that it ends

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.

I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?