Franz Kafka Quotes

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

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

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

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.

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.

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

First impressions are always unreliable.

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.

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

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

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

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

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.