Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

103. “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?”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

105. “This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, also appeared to carry freedom around with it.”

— Franz Kafka

106. “You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.”

— Franz Kafka

107. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

108. “He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”

— Franz Kafka

109. “What am I doing here in this endless winter?”

— Franz Kafka

110. “Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.”

— Franz Kafka

111. “To every instant there is a correspondence in something outside time. This world here and now cannot be followed by a Beyond, for the Beyond is eternal, hence it cannot be in temporal contact with this world here and now.”

— Franz Kafka

112. “The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.”

— Franz Kafka

113. “Don’t be too optimistic, the light at the end of the tunnel might be a train.”

— Franz Kafka

114. “I don’t feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.”

— Franz Kafka

115. “It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.”

— Franz Kafka

116. “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

— Franz Kafka

117. “Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”

— Franz Kafka

118. “I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.”

— Franz Kafka

119. “Only the moment counts. It determines life.”

— Franz Kafka

120. “I do not see the world at all; I invent it.”

— Franz Kafka

121. “Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.”

— Franz Kafka

122. “Writing is prayer.”

— Franz Kafka

123. “This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”

— Franz Kafka

124. “All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”

— Franz Kafka

125. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

126. “I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.”

— Franz Kafka

127. “Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my desk at night.”

— Franz Kafka

128. “It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.”

— Franz Kafka

129. “Kill me, or you are a murderer.”

— Franz Kafka

130. “My ‘fear’ is my substance, and probably the best part of me.”

— Franz Kafka

131. “The truth is always an abyss.”

— Franz Kafka

132. “I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.”

— Franz Kafka

133. “The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.”

— Franz Kafka

134. “I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

136. “What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.”

— Franz Kafka

137. “I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.”

— Franz Kafka

138. “Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.”

— Franz Kafka

139. “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

— Franz Kafka

140. “Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.”

— Franz Kafka

141. “Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.”

— Franz Kafka

142. “You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”

— Franz Kafka

143. “Dread of night. Dread of not-night.”

— Franz Kafka

144. “The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go – not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.”

— Franz Kafka

145. “In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.”

— Franz Kafka

146. “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.”

— Franz Kafka

147. “You can choose to be free, but it’s last decision you’ll ever make.”

— Franz Kafka

148. “Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.”

— Franz Kafka

149. “Please – consider me a dream.”

— Franz Kafka

150. “There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.”

— Franz Kafka