Quotes from Franz Kafka

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.

Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

But I'm not guilty," said K. "there's been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We're all human beings here, one like the other." "That is true" said the priest "but that is how the guilty speak

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

But sleep? On a night like this? What an idea! Just think of how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

Calm —indeed the calmest— reflection might be better than the most confused decisions

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

Go on caring for me.

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

I only fear danger where I want to fear it.

One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.

I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.

The sister played so beautifully. Her face was tilted to one side and she followed the notes with soulful and probing eyes. Gregor advanced a little, keeping his eyes low so that they might possibly meet hers. Was he a beast if music could move him so?