Quotes from Franz Kafka

Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.

I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...

I look a girl in the eye and it was a very long love story with thunder and kisses and lightning. I live fast.

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

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

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

Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.

In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.

No sooner said than done - so acts your man of worth.

If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

"There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction."

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.

It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.