Top 425 Quotes & Sayings by Franz Kafka - Page 3

He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

First impressions are always unreliable.

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

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

From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

I never wish to be easily defined.

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

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

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

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.

They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.

I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

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

One reads in order to ask questions

Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.

I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

The true word leads; the untrue misleads.

I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.

Writing means revealing oneself to excess.

What am I doing here in this endless winter?

No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.".

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.

Writing [is] a form of prayer.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

There's an infinite amount of hope but not for us.

You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.

The truth is always an abyss.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

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

I carry the bars within me.

What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.