Franz Kafka
Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.Collection: Return
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.Collection: Fear
I lack nothing. I only needed myself.Collection: Needed
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.Collection: Understanding
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.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Strong
Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.Collection: Children
Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Eye
To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.Collection: Animal
The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.Collection: Determination
Kill me, or you are a murderer.Collection: Kill Me
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.Collection: Art
What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.Collection: Common
Writing [is] a form of prayer.Collection: Prayer
Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.Collection: Sleep
Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let goof the earth.Collection: Letting Go
I, however, cannot force myself to use "meat drugs" to cheat on my loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Depressing
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.Collection: Patience
Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.Collection: Kissing
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.Collection: Book
And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.Collection: Goodbye
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.Collection: Humility
Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.Collection: Kissing
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.Collection: Morning
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.Collection: Writing
Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Life
Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.Collection: Two
it was like this. the brain could no longer bear the worries and pains that were imposed on it. it said: "i'm giving up; but if there is anyone else here who is interested in preserving the whole, let him assume part of my burden and it will be alright for a bit.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Wall
The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.Collection: Evil
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.Collection: Believe
Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.Collection: Fall
What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.Collection: Communication
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.Collection: Eye
. . . 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.Collection: Suicide
But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.Collection: Time
Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.Collection: Work
They did not know what we can now guess at, contemplating the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence.Collection: Soul
Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.Collection: Men
What is written is merely the dregs of experience.Collection: Dregs
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.Collection: Inner Beauty
Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.Collection: Holiness
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Pieces
So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.Collection: Said