Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “His last words to Robert Klopstock are ‘Kill me, or you are a murderer.”

— Franz Kafka

402. “Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.”

— Franz Kafka

403. “Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.”

— Franz Kafka

404. “One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark.”

— Franz Kafka

405. “So eager are our people to obliterate the present.”

— Franz Kafka

406. “It is possible that some people are sorry for me, but I am not aware of it.”

— Franz Kafka

407. “I look a girl in the eye and it was a very long love story with thunder and kisses and lightning. I live fast.”

— Franz Kafka

408. “In a way, I was safe writing.”

— Franz Kafka

409. “Peaceful moon. I consist only of bones.”

— Franz Kafka

410. “The Diabolical sometimes assumes the aspect of the Good, or even embodies itself completely in its form. If this remains concealedfrom me, I am of course defeated, for this Good is more tempting than the genuine Good.”

— Franz Kafka

411. “May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”

— Franz Kafka

412. “Judgement does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement.”

— Franz Kafka

413. “I am forever chained to myself; that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

416. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

422. “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

423. “I carry the bars within me.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

432. “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

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

436. “Evil is the starry sky of the Good.”

— Franz Kafka

437. “Kafka saw his tuberculosis as a liberation; interestingly, he called it “the animal.”

— Franz Kafka

438. “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

439. “There is infinite hope, but not for man.”

— Franz Kafka

440. “Why was Gregor the only one condemned to work in a firm where, at the slightest lapse, someone immediately attracted the greatest suspicion?”

— Franz Kafka

441. “Books are a narcotic.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

443. “All the love in the world is useless when there is a total lack of understanding.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

447. “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

448. “If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.”

— Franz Kafka

449. “Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka