“Paths are made by walking.”
— Franz Kafka
“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
“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.”
“Evil is whatever distracts.”
“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.”
“Most men are not wicked. They are sleepwalkers, not evil evildoers.”
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self.”
“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
“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.”
“Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.”
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”
“Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”
“Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
“I lack nothing. I only needed myself.”
“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”
“Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”
“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.”
“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”
“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.”
“Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”
“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”
“I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.”
“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.”
“All that you are seeking is also seeking you.”
“I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
“I never wish to be easily defined.”
“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
“Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle – maybe there is none.”
“Love is a drama of contradictions.”
“Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”
“All language is but a poor translation.”
“God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.”
“So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”
“A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”
“A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.”
“In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
“A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a “brief.””
“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.”
“Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.”
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
“He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.”
“What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.”
“First impressions are always unreliable.”
“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.”
“The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.”
“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
“I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.”
“Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”
“If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”
“I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.”
“I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.”
“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
“In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
“Writing means revealing oneself to excess.”
“Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.”
“To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.”
“All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.”
“One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.”
“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.”
“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”
“No one can crave what truly harms him.”
“Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.”
“We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.”
“We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.”
“The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.”
“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.”
“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”
“Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.”
“One reads in order to ask questions.”
“The truth is always an abyss. One must – as in a swimming pool – dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again – laughing and fighting for breath – to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
“Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.”
“You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.”
“Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.”
“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 obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.”
“Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.”
“The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.”
“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
“Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.”
“Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes ‘fast’ like a watch – sometimes.”
“There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.”
“The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.”
“Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr’s death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr’s death.”
“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.”
“Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often – and in my inmost self perhaps all the time – I doubt whether I am a human being.”
“The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.”
“For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.”
“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?”
“This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, also appeared to carry freedom around with it.”
“The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.”
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