Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I am forever chained to myself; that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.”

— Franz Kafka

352. “For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.”

— Franz Kafka

353. “I’m thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.”

— Franz Kafka

354. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”

— Franz Kafka

355. “Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.”

— Franz Kafka

356. “I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.”

— Franz Kafka

357. “I’m not in the right place – alas, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that I’m not in the right place.”

— Franz Kafka

358. “His growing lack of concern for the others hardly surprised him, whereas previously he had prided himself on being considerate.”

— Franz Kafka

359. “Oh well, memories, said I. Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don’t let yourself in for things like that, it’s not for you and not for me. It only weakens one’s present position without strengthening the former one – nothing is more obvious – quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn’t need strengthening.”

— Franz Kafka

360. “Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.”

— Franz Kafka

361. “For now he must lie low and try, through patience and the greatest consideration, to help his family bear the inconvenience he was bound to cause them in his present condition.”

— Franz Kafka

362. “In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.”

— Franz Kafka

363. “The moon shone down on everything with that simplicity and serenity which no other light possesses.”

— Franz Kafka

364. “We can’t carry on like this. Maybe you can’t see it, but I can. I don’t want to call this monster my brother, all I can say is: we have to try and get rid of it.”

— Franz Kafka

365. “Let the future sleep for now, as it deserves. If you wake it too early, you get a groggy present.”

— Franz Kafka

366. “We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.”

— Franz Kafka

367. “I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.”

— Franz Kafka

368. “I have discovered your great wound. You are dying from this flower blooming on your side.”

— Franz Kafka

369. “Palestine needs earth, but it does not need lawyers.”

— Franz Kafka

370. “I, however, cannot force myself to use “meat drugs” to cheat on my loneliness.”

— Franz Kafka

371. “By your side I’m most quiet and most unquiet, most inhibited and most free.”

— Franz Kafka

372. “I mustn’t look at you too much, or I won’t be able to take my eyes off you at all.”

— Franz Kafka

373. “The court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”

— Franz Kafka

374. “My dear parents,” said the sister banging her hand on the table by way of an introduction, “things cannot go on any longer in this way. Maybe if you don’t understand that, well, I do. I will not utter my brother’s name in front of this monster, and thus I say only that we must try to get rid of it. We have tried what is humanly possible to take care of it and to be patient. I believe that no one can criticize us in the slightest.”

— Franz Kafka

375. “In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.”

— Franz Kafka

376. “I carry the bars within me.”

— Franz Kafka

377. “Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set beyond human judgment.”

— Franz Kafka

378. “There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.”

— Franz Kafka

379. “To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.”

— Franz Kafka

380. “The worries that are the burden of which the privileged person makes an excuse in dealing with the oppressed person are in fact the worries about preserving his privileged condition.”

— Franz Kafka

381. “Oh God, I wish you were not on this earth, but entirely within me, or rather that I were not on this earth, but entirely within you; I feel there is one too many of us; the separation into two people is unbearable.”

— Franz Kafka

382. “Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.”

— Franz Kafka

383. “Accept your symptoms, don’t complain of them; immerse yourself in your suffering.”

— Franz Kafka

384. “If education tries to make other persons out of us than we essentially are, deeper inside, it stultifies, and reproach matters.”

— Franz Kafka

385. “Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.”

— Franz Kafka

386. “From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.”

— Franz Kafka

387. “A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.”

— Franz Kafka

388. “If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.”

— Franz Kafka

389. “Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.”

— Franz Kafka

390. “Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.”

— Franz Kafka

391. “If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.”

— Franz Kafka

392. “I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity.”

— Franz Kafka

393. “Was he a beast if music could move him so?”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

395. “The amount of quiet I need does not exist in the world, from which it follows that no one ought to need so much quiet.”

— Franz Kafka

396. “There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.”

— Franz Kafka

397. “But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?”

— Franz Kafka

398. “Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.”

— Franz Kafka

399. “Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn’t make it true.”

— Franz Kafka

400. “Life is as infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s own personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.”

— Franz Kafka