Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Books are a narcotic.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

354. “I am dead and despise anyone who isn’t.”

— Franz Kafka

355. “Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens.”

— Franz Kafka

356. “Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world...”

— Franz Kafka

357. “You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.”

— Franz Kafka

358. “He remembered his family with deep feelings of love.”

— Franz Kafka

359. “Torment yourself as little as possible, then you’ll torment me less.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

361. “Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.”

— Franz Kafka

362. “The man from the country has not expected such difficulties; the law, he thinks, should be accessible to everyone and at all times; but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose, his long, sparse, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better, after all, to wait until he receives permission to enter.”

— Franz Kafka

363. “16 February. Can’t see my way clear. As though everything I possessed had escaped me, and as though it would hardly satisfy me if it all returned.”

— Franz Kafka

364. “We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.”

— Franz Kafka

365. “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.”

— Franz Kafka

366. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

368. “His biggest misgiving came from his concern about the loud crash that was bound to occur and would probably create, if not terror, at least anxiety behind all the doors. But that would have to be risked.”

— Franz Kafka

369. “He looked sadly down at the street, as though it were his own bottomless sadness.”

— Franz Kafka

370. “The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man’s intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.”

— Franz Kafka

371. “How many days have again gone silently by; today is 28 May. Have I not even the resolution to take this penholder, this piece of wood, in my hand every day? I really think I do not. I row, ride, swim, lie in the sun.”

— Franz Kafka

372. “True undoubting is the teacher’s part, continual undoubting the part of the pupil.”

— Franz Kafka

373. “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

374. “A man doesn’t need to fly to the sun, he need only find a patch of clean earth, and crawl there, and let the sun shine on him.”

— Franz Kafka

375. “They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives...”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

377. “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

378. “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

379. “No, I didn’t imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

381. “If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.”

— Franz Kafka

382. “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

383. “I hope it is nothing serious. On the other hand, I must also say that we business people, luckily or unluckily, however one looks at it, very often simply have to overcome a slight indisposition for business reasons.”

— Franz Kafka

384. “In Paradise, as always: that which causes the sin and that which recognizes it for what it is are one. The clear conscience is Evil, which is so entirely victorious that it does not any longer consider the leap from left to right necessary.”

— Franz Kafka

385. “Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

387. “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

388. “Ich schreibe anders als ich rede, ich rede anders als ich denke, ich denke anders als ich denken soll und so geht es weiter bis ins tiefste Dunkel.”

— Franz Kafka

389. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

— Franz Kafka

390. “For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.”

— Franz Kafka

391. “If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka’s true subject.”

— Franz Kafka

392. “First of all, the free man is superior to the bound man. Now the man is in fact free: he can go wherever he wishes, the entrance to the Law alone is denied to him, and this only by one person, the doorkeeper. If he sits on the stool at the side of the door and spends the rest of his life there, he does so of his own free will; the story mentions no element of force.”

— Franz Kafka

393. “I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.”

— Franz Kafka

394. “My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.”

— Franz Kafka

395. “The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.”

— Franz Kafka

396. “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

397. “First of all, I am delighted that you are a vegetarian at heart. I don’t like strict vegetarians all that much, because I too am almost a vegetarian, and see nothing particularly likable about it, just something natural, and those who are good vegetarians in their hearts, but, for reasons of health, from indifference, or simply because they underrate food as such, eat meat or whatever happens to be on the table, casually, with their left hand, so to speak, these are the ones I like.”

— Franz Kafka

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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