Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “But what shall I do when instead of a heart this fear is beating in my body?”

— Franz Kafka

202. “One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.”

— Franz Kafka

203. “I only fear danger where I want to fear it.”

— Franz Kafka

204. “Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.”

— Franz Kafka

205. “The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.”

— Franz Kafka

206. “As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.”

— Franz Kafka

207. “It’s characteristic of this judicial system that a man is condemned not only when he’s innocent but also in ignorance.”

— Franz Kafka

208. “We are instructed to do the negative; the positive is already within us.”

— Franz Kafka

209. “Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.”

— Franz Kafka

210. “The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man’s wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.”

— Franz Kafka

211. “Illusions are more common than changes in fortune.”

— Franz Kafka

212. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.”

— Franz Kafka

213. “I was reading my destiny inside your eyes without knowing it.”

— Franz Kafka

214. “In Kafka’s story “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” Edward Raban fantasizes about splitting into two forms: one, to remain in bed all day, dreaming; the other, to go forth and conduct the business of the world.”

— Franz Kafka

215. “I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.”

— Franz Kafka

216. “I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.”

— Franz Kafka

217. “But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.”

— Franz Kafka

218. “My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”

— Franz Kafka

219. “It follows, perhaps, that we are now both married, you in Vienna, I to my fear in Prague, and that not only you, but I too, tug in vain at our marriage.”

— Franz Kafka

220. “Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let goof the earth.”

— Franz Kafka

221. “Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.”

— Franz Kafka

222. “Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.”

— Franz Kafka

223. “The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.”

— Franz Kafka

224. “His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.”

— Franz Kafka

225. “I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason.”

— Franz Kafka

226. “I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don’t stare so into complete emptiness. Only in this way is there any possibility of improvement for me.”

— Franz Kafka

227. “A false ring of the night bell, once answered – it can never be made right.”

— Franz Kafka

228. “Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead.”

— Franz Kafka

229. “Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.”

— Franz Kafka

230. “I am not actually tired, but numb and heavy, and can’t find the right words. All I can say is: Stay with me, don’t leave me.”

— Franz Kafka

231. “I sink into your eyes whenever I’m looking at you.”

— Franz Kafka

232. “It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.”

— Franz Kafka

233. “A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.”

— Franz Kafka

234. “Lost among these entirely strange people.”

— Franz Kafka

235. “What do I have in common with Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”

— Franz Kafka

236. “Everyone has his cross to bear.”

— Franz Kafka

237. “The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.”

— Franz Kafka

238. “Everyone carries a room about inside him.”

— Franz Kafka

239. “The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.”

— Franz Kafka

240. “These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.”

— Franz Kafka

241. “Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.”

— Franz Kafka

242. “We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”

— Franz Kafka

243. “How are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt when everything is devoid of meaning?”

— Franz Kafka

244. “I am not at peace with myself; I am not always “something,” and if for once I am “something,” I pay for it by “being nothing” for months on end.”

— Franz Kafka

245. “From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.”

— Franz Kafka

246. “The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.”

— Franz Kafka

247. “One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.”

— Franz Kafka

248. “I made the remark that I don’t avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.”

— Franz Kafka

249. “And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.”

— Franz Kafka

250. “If I didn’t hold back for my parents’ sake, I would’ve quit ages ago.”

— Franz Kafka