Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “What is gayer than believing in a household god?”

— Franz Kafka

252. “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

253. “The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.”

— Franz Kafka

254. “It’s impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill.”

— Franz Kafka

255. “I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but cannot stay up there for more than a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying.”

— Franz Kafka

256. “I can never tear myself open wide enough to people to reveal everything and so frighten them away.”

— Franz Kafka

257. “Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”

— Franz Kafka

258. “For humans the idea of freedom is all too often a means of deceiving themselves. And although freedom is among the most exalted of feelings, so is the illusion of freedom among the most exalted of illusions.”

— Franz Kafka

259. “You, who can’t do anything, think you can bring off something like that? How can you even dare to think about it? If you were capable of it, you certainly wouldn’t be in need of it.”

— Franz Kafka

260. “My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.”

— Franz Kafka

261. “The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.”

— Franz Kafka

262. “But what now if all the peace, the comfort, the contentment were to come to a horrible end?”

— Franz Kafka

263. “At the expense of Gregor’s sacrifice, the sister, at the end of the story, stretches her arrogant body and gets the liberation Gregor longed for. Under Gregor’s care first, and then her parents’, the sister enjoys a healthy childhood, one leading to physical and mental development, and one in which she isn’t trapped. Yet our loyalty to Gregor extends even beyond death, and his sister’s cheery success story offers but a bitter pill.”

— Franz Kafka

264. “One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.”

— Franz Kafka

265. “My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.”

— Franz Kafka

266. “Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.”

— Franz Kafka

267. “Adam’s first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.”

— Franz Kafka

268. “You too have weapons.”

— Franz Kafka

269. “No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell – what we take to be the song of angels is their song.”

— Franz Kafka

270. “Since I met you, I’ve felt abandoned without your nearness; your nearness is all I ever dream of, the only thing.”

— Franz Kafka

271. “Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.”

— Franz Kafka

272. “You have given me a gift such as I never even dreamt of finding in this life.”

— Franz Kafka

273. “Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”

— Franz Kafka

274. “My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.”

— Franz Kafka

275. “Asking questions were the most important thing.”

— Franz Kafka

276. “The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.”

— Franz Kafka

277. “I am as I am, and that’s all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...”

— Franz Kafka

278. “Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.”

— Franz Kafka

279. “Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer.”

— Franz Kafka

280. “Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.”

— Franz Kafka

281. “Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.”

— Franz Kafka

282. “The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you,’ that is all that I have known, nothing more.”

— Franz Kafka

283. “I can’t hold enough of you in my hands.”

— Franz Kafka

284. “I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.”

— Franz Kafka

285. “Incidentally, it’s easy to write prescriptions, but difficult to come to an understanding with people.”

— Franz Kafka

286. “The man in ecstasy and the man drowning – both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.”

— Franz Kafka

287. “How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?”

— Franz Kafka

288. “Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.”

— Franz Kafka

289. “Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”

— Franz Kafka

290. “Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.”

— Franz Kafka

291. “Devilish in my innocence.”

— Franz Kafka

292. “Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves and is ready to release what lies deeper.”

— Franz Kafka

293. “I like to make use of what I know.”

— Franz Kafka

294. “Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn’t know the law and at the same time insists he’s innocent.”

— Franz Kafka

295. “And I close my eyes to gaze into those depths, and am almost engulfed in you.”

— Franz Kafka

296. “One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.”

— Franz Kafka

297. “Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.”

— Franz Kafka

298. “He had indeed been so close to forgetting that only the voice of the mother, so long unheard, brought him to his senses.”

— Franz Kafka

299. “A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.”

— Franz Kafka

300. “His last words to Robert Klopstock are ‘Kill me, or you are a murderer.”

— Franz Kafka