Franz Kafka Quotes
sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless manthe most guilty.
Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.
Life is hard, the earth stubborn, science rich in knowledge but poor in practical results.
I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
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 have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")
No sooner is it a little calmer with me than it is almost too calm as though I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy
Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.
Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free, ’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it.
Could K. represent the congregation all by himself? What if he had been a stranger merely visiting the church? That was more or less his position.
Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.
One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.
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.
The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer.
Incidentally, it’s easy to write prescriptions, but difficult to come to an understanding with people.
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do.But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")
Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. ("America: Three Audiences")
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.
