Top 425 Quotes & Sayings by Franz Kafka - Page 4

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

No one can crave what truly harms him.

You need not even listen, just wait...the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.

Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world.

There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.

Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.

Books are a narcotic.

Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.

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

Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.

It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill

Love is a drama of contradictions.

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.

It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.

Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes 'fast' like a watch - sometimes.

Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster

One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.

I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.

One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

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

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

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

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.

My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.

One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

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

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.

Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.

Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.

The limited circle is pure.

Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

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

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.

I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?

The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.