Franz Kafka Quotes

352 quotes in 3350 categories

• You, who can't do anything, think you can bring off something like that? How can you even dare to think about it? If you were…
• . . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of…
• Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by…
• Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
• The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.
• Writing means revealing oneself to excess.
• The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go - not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the…
• A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
• Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a…
• Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite…
• Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.
• A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
• 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…
• One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to…
• There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
• From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside…
• 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…
• A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
• 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…
• 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…

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