Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.”

— Franz Kafka

102. “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

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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

109. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “Writing is prayer.”

— Franz Kafka

115. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

129. “The truth is always an abyss.”

— Franz Kafka

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

138. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

141. “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

142. “That’s how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one’s hand.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

149. “Please – consider me a dream.”

— Franz Kafka

150. “Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.”

— Franz Kafka