Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Paths are made by walking.”

— Franz Kafka

2. “I am free and that is why I am lost.”

— Franz Kafka

3. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

4. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Emotional Quotes, Existentialism Quotes

5. “Evil is whatever distracts.”

— Franz Kafka

6. “There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Patience Quotes

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

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Aesthetic Quotes

8. “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Love Quotes, Resilience Quotes, Loss Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Love You Quotes

9. “I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Fiction Quotes

10. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Wisdom Quotes, Creative Quotes, Solitude Quotes

11. “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Demotivational Quotes

12. “Most men are not wicked. They are sleepwalkers, not evil evildoers.”

— Franz Kafka

13. “Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self.”

— Franz Kafka

14. “Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Compassion Quotes, Quotes About Veganism

15. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

— Franz Kafka

16. “Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

— Franz Kafka

17. “I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Mental Health Quotes, Sad Quotes, Desire Quotes, Depression Quotes

18. “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Mental Health Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Quotes About Feelings

19. “Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Depression Quotes

20. “I lack nothing. I only needed myself.”

— Franz Kafka

21. “Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”

— Franz Kafka

22. “I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Loss Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Loneliness Quotes, Broken Heart Quotes

23. “Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Freedom Quotes

24. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

25. “If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Awakening Quotes, Reading Quotes, Quotes About the Sea

26. “I never wish to be easily defined.”

— Franz Kafka

27. “All that you are seeking is also seeking you.”

— Franz Kafka

28. “Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

30. “There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes, Depression Quotes, Loneliness Quotes

31. “I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.”

— Franz Kafka

32. “I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

34. “Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle – maybe there is none.”

— Franz Kafka

35. “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

37. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Suffering Quotes, Book Quotes

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

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Freedom Quotes, Healing Quotes

39. “All language is but a poor translation.”

— Franz Kafka

40. “A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes, Understanding Quotes

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

— Franz Kafka

42. “Love is a drama of contradictions.”

— Franz Kafka

43. “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Tattoo Quotes

45. “What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.”

— Franz Kafka

46. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

47. “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

— Franz Kafka

48. “A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Depressing Quotes, Book Quotes

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

— Franz Kafka

50. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Depressing Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes, Sadness Quotes