Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

354. “What is gayer than believing in a household god?”

— Franz Kafka

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

361. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

363. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

365. “I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.”

— Franz Kafka

366. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

369. “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

370. “You too have weapons.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

379. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

382. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

384. “The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.”

— Franz Kafka

385. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

387. “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

388. “They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other – since there are no kings – messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.”

— Franz Kafka

389. “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

390. “Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.”

— Franz Kafka

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

391. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

393. “It’s sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it’s at all possible ever to have any success in one’s work here.”

— Franz Kafka

394. “Devilish in my innocence.”

— Franz Kafka

395. “A man might find for a moment that he was unable to work, but that’s exactly the right time to remember his past accomplishments and to consider that later on, when the obstacles has been removed, he’s bound to work all the harder and more efficiently.”

— Franz Kafka

396. “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

397. “The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.”

— Franz Kafka

398. “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

399. “But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.”

— Franz Kafka

400. “And, incidentally: freedom is all too often self-deception among people. Just as freedom is among the most exalted of feelings, so the corresponding deception is among the most exalted of deceptions.”

— Franz Kafka