Quotes from Franz Kafka

Let me remind you of the old maxim: 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.

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one's triumph.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty in every age of life really never grows old.

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

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

"Like a dog!" he said. It seemed as if his shame would live on after him.

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.

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.

What have I in common with Jews? I have almost nothing in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.

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

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.

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

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

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

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.

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

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.

This village belongs to the Castle, and whoever lives here or passes the night here does so in a manner of speaking in the Castle itself. Nobody may do that without the Count's permission.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.