Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

53. “First impressions are always unreliable.”

— Franz Kafka

54. “I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.”

— Franz Kafka

55. “He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.”

— Franz Kafka

56. “In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.”

— Franz Kafka

57. “If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”

— Franz Kafka

58. “I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.”

— Franz Kafka

59. “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.”

— Franz Kafka

60. “The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

62. “I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

64. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

66. “Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.”

— Franz Kafka

67. “To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.”

— Franz Kafka

68. “Writing means revealing oneself to excess.”

— Franz Kafka

69. “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

71. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

72. “Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.”

— Franz Kafka

73. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

74. “One reads in order to ask questions.”

— Franz Kafka

75. “The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.”

— Franz Kafka

76. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

77. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

78. “No one can crave what truly harms him.”

— Franz Kafka

79. “Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.”

— Franz Kafka

80. “Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

82. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

83. “You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.”

— Franz Kafka

84. “Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.”

— Franz Kafka

85. “Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

87. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

88. “Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes ‘fast’ like a watch – sometimes.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

90. “Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.”

— Franz Kafka

91. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

92. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

94. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

95. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

96. “There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

98. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

99. “Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.”

— Franz Kafka

100. “Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.”

— Franz Kafka