Franz Kafka quotes:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

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.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

My 'fear' is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

Religions get lost as people do.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.

The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

my heart no longer beats but is a tugging muscle,

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.

People who walk across dark bridges, past saints,with dim, small lights.Clouds which move across gray skiespast churcheswith towers darkened in the dusk.One who leans against granite railinggazing into the evening waters,His hands resting on old stones.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.

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.

In one and the same human being there are cognitions that, however utterly dissimilar they are, yet have one and the same object,so that one can only conclude that there are different subjects in one and the same human being.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

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

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.

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

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

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

First impressions are always unreliable.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

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

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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.

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.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.

They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong

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

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.

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

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.

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

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

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.

If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you're okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don't let them go. People like that are hard to find.

"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

His biggest misgiving came from his concern about the loud crash that was bound to occur and would probably create, if not terror, at least anxiety behind all the doors. But that would have to be risked.

There are two cardinal human sins out of which all others derive, deviate, and dissipate: impatience and lassitude (or perhaps nonchalance). On account of impatience they are driven out of paradise; on account of lassitude or nonchalance they do not return. Perhaps, however, only one main sense of sin is given: impatience. On account of impatience they are driven out, on account of impatience they do not turn back.

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.

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.

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

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

There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.

and in that recurring dream, I found myself trapped in some sort of gigantic game of which I was unfamiliar with the rules; lost in a labyrinthine town of dark and damp, criss-crossing streets, ambiguous characters of uncertain authority having no idea of why I was there nor what I had to do, and where the first sign of the beginning of understanding was the wish to die.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

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

Leo en Dostoievski el pasaje que tanto se asemeja a ser desdichado

Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes 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,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation

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

Guilt is never to be doubted.

They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus

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.

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 speaks he lies.

The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes.

The limited circle is pure.

So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you.

However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

If all responsibility is imposed on you, then you may want to exploit the moment and want to be overwhelmed by the responsibility;yet if you try, you will notice that nothing was imposed on you, but that you are yourself this responsibility.

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.